No longer inevitable?

With the Iowa presidential caucus three days away and the New Hampshire primary a week out, Hillary the Inevitable has been reduced to Hillary the Insecure.

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose relentless fundraising and organizing made her the presumptive Democratic nominee for all of 2007, might come out of the gate in 2008 with two second-place finishes. According to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg News poll, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has caught the former first lady in both states. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is statistically even with the two in Iowa.

To anyone with a sense of modern political history, this development isn’t terribly surprising. No front-runner can march the campaign trail for a year against well-funded, mainstream opponents without losing some support. Sen. Obama trailed Sen. Clinton by 20 points in New Hampshire as recently as three months ago. In the Times/Bloomberg poll, he led by 2 points, comfortably inside the 4-point margin of error. In Iowa, the poll had him trailing Sen. Clinton by 3 points and leading Mr. Edwards by 1 point, also inside the 4-point margin of error.

Sen. Obama’s gains might indicate that Sen. Clinton’s long-perceived liabilities — too calculating, too unlikable to win a general election — are finally catching up with her candidacy.

Although Iowa poll participants believed Sen. Clinton was the best Democratic candidate for fighting terrorism, handling the economy and ushering health care reforms, they said Sen. Obama was more likely to produce new ideas and change the way things are done in Washington, and that he had more honesty and integrity and was better at saying what he believed.

Those numbers track well with a poll conducted for the Review-Journal earlier this month by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research. That survey discovered that although Sen. Clinton enjoyed an 8-point lead over Sen. Obama among Nevada Democrats heading into the state’s Jan. 19 caucus, Sen. Obama fared much better in hypothetical general election matchups against Republicans.

For example, the poll had Sen. Clinton losing to Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson by 8 points each, to Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee by 11 points each and to Sen. John McCain by 17 points. Meanwhile, Sen. Obama was in a statistical tie with every Republican but Sen. McCain, losing to the Arizona lawmaker by 7 points.

Sen. Obama has much greater appeal among independents and disenchanted Republicans, plain and simple.

Predictably, this narrowing in the polls has ramped up Sen. Clinton’s attack machine. But it would be a far greater service to New Hampshire, Iowa and Nevada partisans — and a greater service to her image and her campaign — if Sen. Clinton instead used her significant campaign resources to further specify her ideas and positions on the foreign policy and pocketbook issues that voters care about.