DES MOINES - Defeat in the Iowa caucuses dealt a severe blow to Hillary Clinton's bid to make history as America's first woman president.
Her loss in the first state to vote, coming in third behind Barack Obama and John Edwards, raises fresh questions over whether she can overcome the fact that many voters dislike her.
Some analysts have long predicted her "high negatives" 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 tumultuous eight years in the White House.
"I am so ready for the rest of this campaign and I am so ready to lead," she said in a speech Thursday as caucus results poured in, reiterating a familiar theme of her campaign.
Clinton, 60, is presenting herself as an experienced agent of change for a new century, in a bid to blunt 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 venomous 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 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 her 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.
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 exposed to global embarrassment by Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, 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, culminating 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, 2001 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.
"I want to make it absolutely clear that we will restore America's moral authority in the world and we are going to tackle all of the problems that are going to be inherited because of the current administration," she said in Iowa.
Those initiatives include "ending the war in Iraq and bringing our troops home and then giving them the support that they need," she added.
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 had a credit card, paying 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/ksh/mac

01/04/2008 05:22 GMT