Timing

There's an old joke where you ask somebody, "What's the secret to great comedy?" As the person being asked starts to speak, the joke-teller interrupts the answer at just the right (funniest) moment to say, "Timing!"

Lately Sen. Hillary Clinton's has been lousy. She's got front-runneritis, and while it's far too early to count her out, especially with her strong base of blue collar female voter support, that means folks are enjoying seeing her well-polled lead chipping away, especially after her campaign operative's Obama smear. God bless Sen. Clinton for firing that operative by the end of the week, but the incident really came to hurt her in Thursday Democratic debate, the "make-or-break" final one before Caucus Day.

The interviewer fired an unexpected question at Sen. Barak Obama: If he's touting himself as the Agent of Change candidate, how does he justify it with so many ex-Clinton advisors working in his campaign?

You can see the moment he looks like he just might stumble in the clip here. Then comes Hillary's now-famous laughter, and she blurts out, "I'm looking forward to hearing that!"

But it gave Obama exactly what he needed -- a target -- and with a pro's sense of timing he replied:

"Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me as well."

She laughs good-naturedly afterwards, but it's hard not to watch the clip without reading in her smart-smart understanding of the moment and its significance. Her laughter is almost like a respectable kudo to the man for shooting it off and so deftly flipping the moment. There's a little bit of crow, and maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I'm thinking we can see that she knows the jig could be up, that this is the next domino in the sequence.

And then the question will become whether she wants it enough. Whether she wants it as much as Obama.

You could understand her wanting it more than Romney or Giuliani or Huckabee on principle. Maybe even measuring herself up against Sen. Joe Biden or Gov. Bill Richardson. Maybe even John Edwards, since she's the corporation-friendly version of his Two Americas position.

But I'm just wondering if she sees the sense in his candidacy, our national need to cleanse our palate and he obvious fitness for that role, especially as he proves his judgment-over-experience position in golden moments like these. Young, smart, charismatic ad-libs like we haven't had since JFK.

Now touting herself as the candidate who will never surprise you (not kidding -- and maybe we actually looking for a pleasant surprise rather than mechanical campaigning or governing.

The desperation, the desperate need to somehow flip any kind of momentum back her way, seems on full display in this moment from an unusual press conference today, wherein she reveals her personal apology to Barak Obama over the smear:

"I wonder if you would take the opportunity to say that a candidate's indiscretions as a teenager should not be an issue on which voters should make there decision?"

Clinton replied, "Well I apologized to Senator Obama yesterday. It's certainly not an issue in my campaign. And I said that to Senator Obama."

Just from the text it appears she isn't agreeing with the questioners, not that she has to, but she clearly has the decency to go woman-to-man with Sen. Obama, and it feels like the right and decent move to me. And watching it you can see she deals with the question in a firm and businesslike way.

What feels weird about the resolution isn't so much what it says about Sen. Clinton's personal prejudice -- she doesn't seem to be -- but what it says about her campaign. Has it gotten out of her control? Is her chief strategist, the union-busting Mark Penn, behind this whole smear, as he perhaps inadvertently seems on this train-wreck of an appearance on Hardball? Will he be gone the day after she loses in Iowa? New Hampshire? South Carolina? Next Wednesday?

In the video from her press conference, she looks rattled. I'm sure internal polling happened continuously from when this story broke, I'm sure she knows this is hemorrhaging her vaunted African-American support, and it feels like we're watching a press conference from deep into an Administration, hers, year two or three, if it goes at all like the last few, i.e. contentious and wearing. Not what we're looking for right now And while I give her props for putting herself out there and taking her licks, she looks worn (imagine the past 24 sleepless hours) and, much worse, for the first time I can remember, she looks scared.

It must be tough after convincing yourself of your inevitability, surrounded by so many people making the same bet on you, to get that first fatalistic glimmer that it might not happen.