Keller @ Large: What Is Happening To Hillary Clinton?
BOSTON (CBS) - Donald Trump is holding onto his lead in most polls, but among democrats, it's a very different story for longtime front-runner Hillary Clinton.
She's trailing in key early voting states and losing ground.
Secretary Clinton still holds important advantages in this race, including money, experience and institutional support. But as she learned in her 2008 loss to Barack Obama, other factors, like charisma and a timely message, can sometimes matter more.
When summer began, she was considered a shoo-in. As it comes to an end, she's in free-fall. What is happening to Hillary Clinton?
As a veteran establishment insider, she has suffered from voter fascination with shiny new toys like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who for the moment leads her in Iowa and New Hampshire. And the most recent CNN poll shows her losing to republican Ben Carson and tied with Jeb Bush and Trump.
But the biggest problem right now with the Clinton campaign is its candidate.
Touting her work as Secretary of State makes sense but she's doing it at a time when Obama foreign policy is widely unpopular.
The listening-tour roundtables that once helped elect her to the senate now seem stilted and unpersuasive.
And amid word her handlers want her to show more "spontaneity," an awkward photo op in Iowa Monday, where the gourmet popcorn seemed to hold undue fascination for Clinton, revealed the difficulty of squeezing fresh warmth from a fully-baked public persona.
Consider the contrast with potential candidate Joe Biden.
And worst of all for Clinton, new polling shows a 21-point drop in her support among women in just the past two months, erasing the edge she needs to break the ultimate political glass ceiling.
Hillary Clinton has been hurt by things she can control, like her email bungling, and by things she can't, like the public thirst for something new. She has plenty of time to turn things around. But this late-summer slide is a reminder that there's no such thing as entitlement when it comes to the presidency.
