How Clinton Will Win the Nomination

To have a chance, the Clinton folks figure, she must win Indiana on Tuesday and do well enough to keep Obama's lead by the end of the primaries closer to 100 delegates than to 200.

She must also find a way to get some votes counted from Michigan and Florida, whose delegations are barred from the convention for violating the party's primary timetable.

Then the superdelegates would have their moment. Over the past two months, their conversations have shifted from a fascination with the rush of young people onto the voting rolls, benefiting Obama, to a focus on older voters and Catholics.

They have broken heavily for Clinton in Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states vital to Democratic chances of assembling an electoral college majority.

Second, the Jeremiah Wright affair and other recent incidents have reminded the uncommitted how little they really know about Obama -- including his ability to deal with political crises, real or manufactured.

Clinton has plenty of scars from past battles that weaken her, compared with Obama, but the uncommitted have seen her demonstrate repeatedly that she has the will to survive and fight back.

Those two factors have begun to change some superdelegates' minds about the candidate they want to see nominated.

But they have not yet overcome the deep discomfort many of them feel as they contemplate taking the nomination away from Obama.

They know that would break the hearts of his African American supporters, who have been the most loyal of Democratic constituencies.

However, under other circumstances, African Americans would show their love for Hillary Clinton (if not so much now for her husband). But at the moment, they see her only as a threat to knock out their favorite.

If the superdelegates should decide to take the risk and cast their lot with Clinton, how would she be able to heal the wounds of a fight to the finish with Obama?

The Clinton camp's answer comes in two parts.

First, they say that the institutional party -- the unions, the environmental groups, the abortion rights groups and others that are desperate for victory after losing twice to George Bush.

They also recognize the potential appeal of John McCain -- would exert heavy pressure on the losing side not to sulk or erupt.

And second, the Clinton camp hopes that, if he is counted out, Obama, just 46, would think about his long-term future and secure his own status as heir apparent by reconciling his followers to a bitter but temporary defeat and by throwing all his energies behind Clinton.

In effect, it may well be beyond Clinton's power to win the nomination without severely damaging the party. Only Obama can make her winning seem right.

"You're Simply the Best!"

Hillary Clinton is waving her fists across Indiana, signing autographs on boxing gloves.

“We need a president who’s a fighter again,” Mrs. Clinton said at a rally on Thursday, adding that the next president must understand what it is like to “get knocked down and get back up: that’s the story of America, right?”

In recent days, Mrs. Clinton has chided the experts for “counting me out” and Senator Barack Obama for his inability to “close the deal” and declared that no one was going to make her quit.

“She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy,” North Carolina’s governor, Michael F. Easley, said in endorsing her, and a union leader in Portage, Ind., praised her “testicular fortitude.”

Clinton’s supporters say she possesses the necessary grit. Her feisty talk seems to play well with people in her audiences, many of them women who are quick to hail her fighting bona fides.

“Would you want to take her on?” asked Barbara Anderson of Jeffersonville. “I’ll tell you, she has survived her fight. Obama has yet to have his.”

While Mrs. Clinton is casting herself as a warrior for ordinary Americans who need jobs, health care and cheaper gasoline, she is also establishing a contrast with her opponent, suggesting he is an untested lightweight.

She mocks Mr. Obama’s rhetoric as naïve and challenges him to debate her on the back of a flat-bed truck.

When asked if the fighting motif could go too far, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that it could, but then quickly contrasted her aggressive style with Mr. Obama’s.

His campaign “has been about creating an atmosphere,” she said. “I’ve never understood that. Because it’s not easy. I’ve been in a lot of these fights.”

Mrs. Clinton wears her battle scars proudly, and her surrogates promote them. In introducing her at a campaign event in Jeffersonville last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the crowd she had “endured one of the most savage beatings of anyone I’ve ever seen in my lifetime” from her political adversaries on the right.

Her fighting style was honed in combat against opponents who could be relentless in their own right, both in Arkansas, where she was criticized as the young governor’s uppity wife who refused to take his name, and in Washington, where Republicans vowed to kill her efforts to overhaul health care.

From Mr. Clinton’s 1980 defeat as governor in Arkansas and the Democrats’ presidential losses through the next decade, the Clintons took away an enduring lesson: No attack can go unanswered. It must be dealt with fast, hard and decisively.

Mrs. Clinton is said to be a more disciplined fighter than her husband. “He never stops trying to convert people,” said Max Brantley, an old friend of the Clintons from Arkansas, who writes a column for The Arkansas Times, an alternative newspaper.

“She’s much more clear-eyed, recognizing the imperfectability of people.”

She is also quick to recognize when they become liabilities and is ready to cast them aside when necessary.

Both friends and critics of Mrs. Clinton said she would never have engaged in the long struggle that Mr. Obama did before finally breaking with his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. “He would not have been my pastor,” she said to reporters.

In recent years, Mrs. Clinton has more readily acknowledged her mistakes and become more willing to compromise.

She has also disarmed old enemies — courting, if not entirely winning over, some of her nemeses in the news media, like Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife, a longtime anti-Clinton activist whose newspaper, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, endorsed her before the Pennsylvania primary.

“Part of being a political warrior is knowing when to maintain a grudge and when not to,” said Mr. Reich, the former labor secretary.

“If you need somebody for a vote, if you need the media, then there’s no reason to settle scores. You do what you have to do.”

In the Senate, where her colleagues included many of her husband’s fiercest critics, she has determinedly worked with almost every Republican on legislation.

“She’s a survivor,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who was an impeachment manager when he served in the House yet now has a working friendship with Mrs. Clinton. “Don’t ever count her out.”

As Mr. Obama has learned, the central principle of Mrs. Clinton’s combat style is simple endurance. Like her husband, she has always taken fierce pride in sticking around, outlasting enemies.

“We’re going to keep on going,” Mr. Clinton said to his wife in the final passage of Bob Woodward’s book “The Agenda” after the couple had pushed the White House economic plan through Congress. “They’re never going to stop us.”

That scene has obvious resonance today in Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, and with voters.

“She’s not going to quit, not going to quit fighting,” said Jody O’Dell of Decatur, Ill., who met Mrs. Clinton last week in Jeffersonville. She got her signature, too, a prized “Hillary” across a pair of red boxing gloves.