HAMPTON, N.H.--If you ignored the Secret Service agents, the hordes of reporters and the fact that the candidate was wearing a dark pansuit and a bright pink blouse, last night's Democratic campaign stop at Winnacunnet High School looked a lot like a Joe Biden event.

The crowd was not young. The room was not full. And the guest of honor, Hillary Clinton, spoke for two straight hours.

With Obama now leading 39-29 in the latest University of New Hampshire poll and 41-28 in CNN/Gallup--and packing houses with young, raucous supporters--it wasn't a particularly helpful image to present on the eve of the primary. At Clinton headquarters, top aides are fuming. "Convinced [Obama] would crumble," writes the Politico's Mike Allen, "they waited too long to take the brutal steps necessary to define him--expose him, in their view--as a conventional politician." Now, according to Allen and Ben Smith, they privately expect to lose New Hampshire on Tuesday--and South Carolina on the 26th, as black voters see that Obama can win in white America. Clinton will continue through Feb. 5, when she plans to triumph in delegate-rich California, New York, New Jersey and Arkansas. But what was once inevitable is looking increasingly improbable.

It was clear in the Winnacunnet cafeteria last night that Clinton is fighting to stay in the game. Standing in the round, she delivered a punchy, pointed, 15-minute opening statement--"There's a difference between talk and action, rhetoric and reality"--that framed Obama as an ordinary politician with an extraordinary teleprompter. (He voted to fund the Iraq war, Clinton said, even though he brags about opposing it.)

Then she took questions. Lots of questions. Like, 34 questions. The most I'd ever seen her answer before? Five. (Seriously. It was exhausting.) And while reporters may carp about the cynicism of Clinton's sudden accessibility--she skipped the Q&A's altogether in the run-up to Iowa, when she was leading in the polls--most voters don't tune in until the last minute. In fact, the locals I spoke to praised Clinton's "open, issue-driven, specific" approach and criticized Obama, who's now taking fewer queries from the crowd, for not following suit--exactly the conclusion the campaign was hoping they'd come to. "I'm not a rah-rah person," Joanne Barton, an undecided resident of Rye, N.H., told me. "And Obama's relying too much on rah-rah. He's not addressing our concerns. I'm impressed that Hillary would put herself out there." Shows how much we hacks know. 

As hard as Clinton tried last night, however, Murphy's Law was a formidable foe. Not only was she an hour-and-a-half late--which far exceeds even the expected delay and meant people who'd been there since 5:00 p.m. were constantly filing out from 7:00 on--but the fire marshal refused to fill the room to anything near its physical capacity (see photo above), sending away or diverting to the auditorium hundreds of supporters. Fearing man-on-the-street interviews with disappointed Granite Staters, staffers rushed around corralling reporters into a press pen at the rear of the room. "Please get behind the rope," one said to me. "Why?" I asked. "Because you have to get behind the rope," he explained. I asked if it was a space issue. He was not amused.

Near the end of the event, Clinton was riffing on the risks of foreign-policy inexperience--and implicitly linking Obama to George W. Bush, who famously looked into Vladimir Putin's soul--when she committed a gaffe one reporter jokingly said would spur an "international incident." "Most leaders are not going to make decisions based on their personal relationships," she said. "I could've told him: he was a KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul." International incident or not, the quip, which won't play well in Moscow, got massive media attention--undercutting Clinton's argument about experience and obscuring the rest of her impressive performance.

Finally, in asking one of the last questions of the night--"What will you do for veterans?"--a burly, mustachioed man couldn't help but let it slip that he was not a New Hampshirite. "We love you in New York," he said. Turns out he's a 58-year old Teamster named Pete Gutierrez who volunteered full-time for Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign and just arrived in the Granite State to volunteer again. Which is all well and good--except why are volunteers who can't even vote in the primary asking questions? For me, the revelation jaundiced the whole event; at least 32 of the 34 questions were requests for policy positions--"What's your health care plan?" or "What will you do about global warming?"--so it's not hard to imagine that at least a few of them came from fellow volunteers. I'm not saying they were plants, or that Clinton didn't answer ably. But if interaction between the candidate and real, live undecideds is limited, a Q&A quickly becomes mere PR. Which sort of defeats the purpose--or at least dulls the desired effect.