The latest polling shows Hillary Clinton trailing Barack Obama by a few points in Wisconsin. It remains a mystery why she did not spend more time in the state and make more of an effort to narrow the gap or pull out an upset. Not having done so, however, allows her to claim great surprise and delight if the margin of victory for Obama is small. It is a measure of how poorly things are going that she will need to spin a close loss as the beginning of her “comeback.”

It was a test case of sorts, the first opportunity to take small steps along the path to negative campaigning, which I suspect will ramp up as she heads into Texas (where the latest poll puts her barely in the lead). I think we will hear plenty of “all hat no cattle” and every other metaphor in the political consultants’ bag of phrases. Certainly, the exaggerated and self-indulgent rhetoric from the Obama camp is a starting point for her argument to working-class voters that Obama is not grounded in the real world and is ill equipped to go up against those mean Republicans. (Perhaps she can conduct a mass leafleting campaign, dropping copies of David Brooks’ latest column from the air as she flies around the country.) Her first major opportunity to try to reverse the media storyline (i.e. faltering Clinton) will come at Thursday’s debate.