Early on, she was too stodgy. Later on, she was too negative. She spent too much money in Iowa. She didn't spend enough money in Iowa.

She should have campaigned on women's issues. Being a woman hurt her. Her campaign was stacked with experts on party rules -- who ignored the party's rules.

She didn't catch on to small-donor fundraising until too late. She concentrated on a few big states and didn't try in smaller ones. She was the candidate of experience when the country was hungering for change.

On and on it goes.

And then there's this: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the transformative, historic female presidential candidate, had the bad luck or bad timing to be running against Sen. Barack Obama, the transformative, historic black presidential candidate, who also happened to have the political gifts of a Robert F. Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan -- or a Bill Clinton.

"People who say Bill Clinton hurt his wife's campaign have got this whole thing backward," contends Drew Westen, an Emory University political scientist and author of "The Political Brain."

"Sen. Clinton had the misfortune to be running against someone with the political skills of her husband, someone who comes along only once or twice in a lifetime," Mr. Westen said.

Most political observers say she's cooked.

"Toast," the New York Post crowed after she lost North Carolina and barely won Indiana. Her commanding wins in West Virginia May 13 and Kentucky on Tuesday earned her little more than a collective shrug from the punditocracy.

It's simply a matter of arithmetic: With three primaries left, Mrs. Clinton needs 84 percent of all remaining delegates -- both pledged and unpledged -- to lock up the nomination, while Mr. Obama needs only 23 percent. While she is expected to win Puerto Rico's primary next Sunday, she is not favored in the last contests -- South Dakota and Montana -- two days later.

Mrs. Clinton is also trailing her opponent in the popular vote, unless you count Florida and Michigan, which she does. (Mr. Obama's name wasn't on the ballot in Michigan and neither candidate campaigned in Florida.) She's expected to argue for those states' inclusion at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee's Rules Committee next weekend in Washington, D.C. In a speech last week in Boca Raton, Fla., she compared herself and her quest to include the two states' delegations to civil rights activists, abolitionists and suffragists, while invoking Selma, Zimbabwe, the Declaration of Independence and Florida's 2000 recount.

It's a long way from a year ago, when, as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, the aura of inevitability clung to her like summer humidity. Indeed, the race was hers to lose. Despite grumblings about her vote to authorize the Iraq war, she'd been leading in all the polls for months as the candidate of experience.

The problem was, it was exactly the wrong message for 2008.

"It was a backward-looking message, while Obama had a forward-looking message at a time when the country was so ready and so ripe for change," said Tad Devine, an unaligned Democratic political strategist who was a senior adviser to Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential run in 2004.

Mrs. Clinton's advisers were veteran party insiders whose strategy focused on big state wins, which matter in the general election, but not in the nominating process, where delegates choose the party's nominee. After Super Tuesday, Mr. Obama went on to win 11 caucuses and primaries, some them very small, allowing him to rack up a delegate lead in the next month.

"He netted 87 delegates ahead of her during that period, which put him ahead and kept him ahead, and she never caught up," said Mr. Devine.

"The Clintons acted as if they didn't know or care about the rules of the game," added Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who is unaffiliated with either candidate. "They completely gave up on a whole set of caucus states where Obama wrested a delegate lead, but she wasn't there at all."

When it became clear that the race would not be over as expected by Feb. 4, Super Tuesday, the Clinton campaign scrambled to put organizations in states where they'd never expected to compete.

In Texas, for example, the Obama campaign had field operatives on the ground months before the Clinton campaign did, and while Mrs. Clinton ultimately won the popular vote, the state's peculiar hybrid primary-caucus system meant that Mr. Obama won more delegates in the end.

"The whole notion of a campaign is, leave no stone unturned," said Mr. Devine, "and that was the kind of campaign the Obama campaign ran. They knew the rules and were everywhere."

Money was the other big problem. Mrs. Clinton assumed she could out-raise and outspend Mr. Obama by relying on large donors, but Mr. Obama's Internet fundraising machine blew her and every other candidate out of the water, with more than a third coming from small donors who can give repeatedly. Last month, the Illinois senator was raising $1 million a day, while Mrs. Clinton was forced to lend herself money.

The Clintons "started out with 300,000 names in their database but didn't hit them until it was too late. She should have been out there on that earlier," said Peter Fenn, who advised former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 race but who is uninvolved in either campaign this year.

"Barack Obama was the 'change' candidate in more ways than one. He changed the way campaigns are run. He didn't pressure people who gave $25 to just give more money, he got them engaged, volunteering, blogging."

While most observers agree Mrs. Clinton's Iowa defeat on Jan. 3 was a major setback, not everyone thought she should have even been there.

"The decision to go all out in Iowa was clearly not the best choice," said Mr. Devine, who noted that caucus states -- Iowa, Idaho, Washington, Nebraska, among others -- tend to be stacked with party activists (read, liberals) who were fired up on the war and unhappy with Mrs. Clinton's vote on Iraq.

"There was a lot of debate in the campaign about whether to take a pass on it. Instead they doubled down on Iowa and spent an enormous amount of money that made it difficult for them later on," Mr. Devine said.

If she'd waited to begin in New Hampshire, where a win was more likely because the Clintons' relationships with supporters -- dating back to Bill Clinton's run there in 1992 -- were deeper, she "would have had the money she needed to compete after Super Tuesday."

Mr. Mellman disagreed.

"I think they underinvested in Iowa," he said, noting that Mr. Obama spent 45 percent more money on television ads than she did, even though she'd raised almost as much money.

"And remember, she was ahead for many months. It's pretty hard to make the case that she was ahead but could have never have won there," he said.

In the beginning, her style on the stump was awkward, too, noted Mr. Westen. "She had a 12-point plan for every issue, but then again so did Obama," who was being criticized last summer for his dull performances in candidates' forums. As soon as he resorted to a more energized form of speechmaking, he began rising in the polls, Mr. Westen said.

And while Mrs. Clinton eventually found her voice -- the tough fighter for average working folks, which ultimately won over blue collar males, her most skeptical constituency -- by the time she did, it was too late.

That emphasis on winning the white male vote represents a lost opportunity, some women activists believe. Faye Wattleton, longtime head of Planned Parenthood and now president of the Center for the Advancement of Women, complained in her blog in March that the men around Mrs. Clinton had turned her into "just another partisan attack dog."

Mrs. Clinton "didn't speak to issues women care about," Ms. Wattleton argued in a recent interview. "She ran a campaign that was male-dominated, the kind of campaign she concluded she needed to run to win over male voters, but in doing so she fractured a female constituency that should have been solidly enthusiastic in lockstep for her and was not."

Mrs. Clinton did win big percentages of the women's vote in Pennsylvania and other states, but Ms. Wattleton, who has not endorsed any candidate, believes support in this state and elsewhere would have been higher if she'd addressed "women in a way that reflects a visceral understanding of the continuing struggle for equality and fair treatment and how her presidency will truly make a difference for women."

Kate Michelman, the former head of the National Abortion Rights Action League, agreed, although she says she also understood why it was important to appeal to men as well as women.

"I am not suggesting she should not have been tough and strong," said Ms. Michelman. "She could not have sat back and not been tough, but it required a melding of that with a sensibility about how unique and historic her candidacy was. At times the campaign did allow her to bring out in a more profound way her strengths, but there were also times when it disintegrated into some very nasty, unbecoming behavior."

A lot of that bad behavior, she and others say, came from Bill Clinton -- when he claimed in New Hampshire that the Obama "change" message was a "fairy tale," or when he lost his temper at reporters and supporters, or when he accused the Obama campaign of playing "the race card" in South Carolina.

The former president raised scads of money and brought Mrs. Clinton tremendous political support, Mr. Devine said, "with the thought that he would function as a de facto vice presidential candidate, to push back off Obama. But that blew up in her face and he became more of a liability than an asset. "

It's not clear what happens next in Mrs. Clinton's amazing political trajectory. Will she become Mr. Obama's vice presidential running mate? Will she return to the Senate and try to build on the legacy of Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was diagnosed last week with a terminal brain cancer?

In the end, experts remain divided on the legacy of Mrs. Clinton's candidacy.

"She has enhanced her standing in the political community and the public," said Mr. Mellman, noting that when she began running, up to 50 percent of voters said they'd never support her.

Starting in New Hampshire "when she battled back from her defeat in Iowa," Mr. Devine noted, along with three or four other primaries, "she hung tough, and that's what she's getting credit for. She was able to take her own narrative, of a fighter being beaten down in a lot of quarters, and turn it into the narrative of the country. She took her own story and used it to say to the voters, 'I understand your problems.' "

"There are a lot of what-ifs out there, enough to keep political scientists busy for a long time," added Susan Hansen, a politicial science professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who believes Mrs. Clinton's candidacy will hurt women candidates more than it helps them.

"I think she leaves a very sad and bitter legacy for women in politics, because her candidacy reinforced a lot of gender prejudices," she said, noting that Mrs. Clinton herself said that "sexism" had dogged her throughout the campaign. "It will ultimately make it even more difficult, I think, for other women to seek higher elected office."

Whatever the case, people will have to add another adjective to all the words, both good and bad, that have been used to describe the former first lady, said Mr. Mellman: tenacity.

"She'll be seen as someone who perseveres through thick and thin," he said.

And while gender bias may continue to be a problem in America's political culture -- along with racism, sexual orientation and other "identity" issues dividing voters -- ultimately, he believes, a woman running for president "is no longer going to be seen as strange or unusual. Hillary Clinton may not have broken the glass ceiling but she's cracked it in a pretty big way."