Until last weekend, many Democrats and most left leaning pundits were gleefully portraying Hillary Clinton as the Robert Mugabe of Westchester. Behind in the tally of states, the popular vote, and the number of delegates needed to win, she was seen, like the tyrant of Harare, as roundly beaten but stubbornly refusing to concede defeat.

Then came news of Barack Obama’s private assessment, delivered behind closed doors to a meeting of supporters in San Francisco, that small town Pennsylvania voters are so “bitter” about their plight that they “cling to guns or religion” and are driven to xenophobia and “anti-immigrant sentiment.” At first the Illinois senator insisted that what he said was accurate and certainly not patronizing to the blue-collar voters he so urgently needs to end Senator Clinton’s presidential bid. Then he said his words were misconstrued. But the cell phone camera does not lie.

His view was offensive to those for whom hunting with a gun is a simple pleasure and whose religious beliefs stem from a thirst for spiritual fulfillment. The Harvard law lecturer, who measures his language carefully and insists that words count, was left wriggling on the hook, blaming Mrs. Clinton for, of all things, playing politics. The nerve!

The Democratic race, like a schooner tacking into the wind, has zig-zagged once more and it is now Mrs. Clinton who can lay claim to Senator Obama’s slogan “The Audacity of Hope.” Until the weekend she was on the canvass. Now, it seems, everything still is in play. Pennsylvania, which votes next Tuesday, may be the key to her 11th hour resurrection.

According to an American Research Center poll taken between April 10 and 13, before the “guns or religion” remarks had been given full play in the press, Mrs. Clinton enjoyed a 20 point lead in the state, a sharp improvement in her position just a week before. An ARC survey between April 5 and 6 put the candidates neck and neck.

Democrats are now asking themselves whether they were too precipitate in placing their hopes in a candidate about whom they knew so little. Mr. Obama is smooth tongued and good looking, with a plausible manner, but the more we come to know of him, the more he looks like a certain loser in November.

You don’t have to be as cunning as Karl Rove to see that an Obama candidacy offers a perfect chance for opponents to paint the Illinois Senator as a deeply flawed presidential contender. He has provided plenty of ammunition for conservative 527 groups to run lurid advertisements against him in the fall. It is not just that Mr. Obama befriended Antoin “Tony” Rezko, currently appearing in a Chicago court on corruption charges. Nor that, notwithstanding the pending criminal investigation, he entered into a property deal with Mr. Rezko’s wife that left him substantially enriched.

Nor is it merely his choice of the black separatist the Reverend Jeremiah Wright as his spiritual advisor, nor his decision to remain in his pew despite the anti-American bile that the pastor regularly showered upon his congregation.

Nor, if Mrs. Clinton has excused her husband’s wayward behavior, should Mr. Obama be blamed if his wife Michelle, who has benefited from a first class education at Princeton and Harvard, could find nothing to be proud of in America until her husband won the Iowa primary. But the “guns or religion” remark is a reminder that the senator is not quite the person he sets out to appear to be.

Democrats hoping to take advantage of the wind of change blowing across America wonder what else might emerge about their favorite in the coming months. On Monday, for the first time the senator’s name was mentioned in the Rezko trial, when evidence showed he attended a party thrown by Mr. Rezko for a London-based Iraqi-born billionaire, Nadhmi Auchi.

Mr. Auchi, who was convicted of fraud in France and sentenced to 15 months in prison, is no friend of America. Indeed, he is deemed an undesirable alien by the State Department and is now barred from re-entering the country. What is troubling is that Senator Obama says he has no memory of the Auchi party, just as, for many months, he had no recollection of the details of the Rezko property deal from which he profited.

It may be too late to stop the rush to crown Senator Obama, though Senator Clinton has pointed out, correctly, that even “elected” delegates are free to follow their consciences and change their vote if they feel that circumstances have changed. According to party rules, they have the same right as superdelegates to pick the candidate most likely to win at the general election.

Tonight the two Democratic candidates meet to debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Senator Obama is confident there is little that can upset his lead over Senator Clinton. “We’ve done it so often that I could do Hillary’s lines and she could do my lines and we could each debate as the other person,” he told the co-moderator, Charles Gibson.

Mrs. Clinton must take the initiative if she is to become her party’s nominee, though she must tread a fine line between robustly pressing her advantage and avoiding causing offense. If she strikes the wrong note, she puts everything at stake. Not only will she risk losing the nomination, she could condemn the Democrats to a resounding defeat in November.

nwapshott@nysun.com