DES MOINES - Defeat in the Iowa caucuses deals a severe blow to Hillary Clinton's bid to make history as America's first woman president in her very first attempt to put her quest to the voters.
Her loss, seemingly coming in third behind Barack Obama and John Edwards, raises fresh questions over whether she can overcome her high negative approval ratings which some analysts have long predicted could make her unelectable, as she heads into the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
She will need all the famous survival qualities, which made her husband the "comeback kid" in his 1992 election campaign, and helped the couple weather a tumultous eight years in the White House.
Clinton, 60, is presenting herself as an experienced agent of change for a new century, in a bid to blunt Barack Obama's powerful oratorical calls for a generational cleansing of embittered US politics.
She is the woman Americans most admire, according to a recent poll, yet she provokes venemous attacks by enemies and rolling hours of bile on conservative talk radio.
Some serious political experts believe her high negative poll ratings, mean she can never win the US presidency, and might drive legions of angry Republicans to the polls returning a Republican to the White House.
Throughout the campaign, her staff have tried to bring out her softer side, in a bid to make her more likeable.
Her attempt to break America's highest glass ceiling suggests a feminist icon: at campaign stops she has pointed out old ladies born before women could vote, but who may live to see a female president.
Yet critics carp that Clinton is merely a senator given a White House shot thanks to her husband -- and hint that her decision to stick with him despite his infidelities was born of a lust for power.
Even Clinton's enemies acknowledge a razor sharp intellect and mastery of policy, yet as first lady she sometimes had a political tin ear, and still cannot match her husband's political alchemy.
After years battling Republicans, no one could doubt Clinton's toughness.
"I have taken their incoming fire for 16 years, and much to their dismay, I am still here," Clinton told supporters on a swing though Iowa Monday.
A qualified lawyer with a degree from the prestigious Yale Law School, Clinton put Americans on notice early in her husband's 1992 presidential campaign that she was "not the kind of woman who stays at home baking cookies."
But many bristled at the idea that in electing Bill Clinton as president, voters also got the cerebral Hillary in a great two-for-one bargain.
She has tried in her presidential run to turn one of her greatest defeats, the disastrous healthcare reform bid during her husband's administration, into a metaphor for a refuse-to-lose battle on behalf of regular Americans.
She was also at the center of a string of administrative scandals in the Clinton administration.
Then, she was exposed to global embarrassment, by Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern, which led to his impeachment.
She stuck with the marriage though moments of estrangement in the White House, but emerged from the ordeal as a political figure in her own right, culiminating in her capture of a New York Senate seat in 2000.
Surprising some observers she became a popular and effective Senator, and despite her years battling Republicans, often worked across the aisle.
In 2002, she voted, with many other Democrats to authorize President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq.
At the time, with the United States still traumatized by the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Clinton's vote was hailed as a sign of strength.
But amid signs the United States was losing the peace in Iraq, and as she started to try to court fiercely anti-war Democrats in her 2008 campaign, it became a millstone.
Clinton was brought up in a middle class suburb of Chicago, and frequently recalls her father, a conservative Republican and a frugal man who never owned a credit card, and paid for new cars only when he had saved up enough cash.
She remains close to her mother Dorothy Rodham, who was by her side on caucus night, and often says the greatest achievement on her dazzling resume, was bringing up a poised daughter, Chelsea, in the fishbowl of the White House.
col/jkb

01/04/2008 02:58 GMT