It’s almost a year before the New Hampshire primary, and already the pressure is building on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She’s been a candidate for about a month, and religious conservatives are salivating at the prospect she might get the Democratic presidential nomination; they have no strong candidate to support, but they are taking solace that they sure might have someone they can oppose. But the most pressure on Sen. Clinton is not coming from her opponents. It is coming from her friends.

Many of her friends are worried. They’re mostly liberal Democrats, or Friends of Bill emeriti, and they have one thing they hate in common (the war in Iraq) and one thing they love in common (the 42nd president of the United States). The nascent presidential drive of Sen. Clinton hasn’t figured out how to handle either, and hasn’t recognized that its 2008 campaign cannot survive through the spring of 2007 with the strategy it has in the winter of 2007.

Clinton strategy

Here, simply, is the apparent Clinton strategy: She voted for the war, she thinks it has gone wrong, but she wasn’t wrong to vote for it and isn’t going to say she was wrong. She married Bill Clinton, she loves him still, and though he embarrassed her with his private conduct, he’s still her husband (and also the most brilliant political strategist on the face of the planet), but she’s not going to be seen with him.

Now, there are good reasons for these strategies. No one likes to admit an error. (We’re talking here about the war she voted for, not the man she stayed with.) No one is particularly happy with the way the war is going, and that includes many lawmakers in Washington on the Republican side. But to say she was wrong – to acknowledge that she was hoodwinked – seems to be too much for Sen. Clinton.

And yet she can hear the hooves behind her. Some of them come from Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who has officially declared his presidential campaign and, on the very day he did so, told reporters he thought his principal rival wasn’t clear or specific enough on the most important issue of the campaign. He then told supporters the war shouldn’t have been authorized in the first place, which is a none-too-subtle dig at Sen. Clinton, who voted to authorize the war.

Sen. Obama is safe in making these comments. He wasn’t in Washington for the Iraq war vote, but he made his opposition clear at the time. Now he advocates withdrawal of American troops within the next 13 months. Another 2008 candidate, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, voted the same way Sen. Clinton did, but he has repudiated his vote and said it was a mistake. He’s calling for an immediate withdrawal of American troops.

Clinton’s stance on war

Sen. Clinton’s reluctance to repudiate her support for the war – the furor is not over the way she thought but over the way she voted – is empowering Mr. Edwards, who only several weeks ago seemed to be an afterthought in the 2008 race, but who now seems to be a serious threat to Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton. Mr. Edwards may lack the high-profile support (and the big-money power) of either of his rivals, but he has a real authenticity and passion that are swiftly making him an important factor in the race.

His very presence in the race – not necessarily his poll ratings – is making it difficult for Sen. Clinton to parse her Iraq remarks as carefully as she has been doing. Mr. Edwards sounds as if he is expressing his outrage, and she sounds as if she is testifying before a grand jury. That’s an unfortunate image but an apt one. And the result is that Sen. Clinton unwittingly may be permitting Mr. Edwards to transform himself into a purist in a contest where much of the energy, and a substantial portion of the vote, comes from purists.

Bill Clinton’s influence

Now to the issue of Bill Clinton. Everyone knows that Sen. Clinton is his wife, and indeed Sen. Clinton has taken to making warm, offhand comments about Mr. Clinton, including references to his prodigious consumption of Dunkin’ Donuts in New Hampshire and his prowess as a comeback artist in the state. He’s hardly ever seen with her, but he’s hardly ever really absent from her persona and her speeches. Not long ago she made a pretty good remark about how she and he weren’t exactly unaccustomed to attacks from the right. Nobody missed her meaning.

But the conundrum that her husband presents is fully encapsulated in her campaign in New Hampshire, where, by the way, Mr. Clinton came in second, not first, in 1992. (The winner was former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts.) Yes, he declared himself the “comeback kid” in the Granite State, but what did he come back from? Charges, which have yet to either be disproved or proved relevant, that he had an affair with a one-time television personality in Arkansas. Not exactly the comeback Sen. Robert F. Kennedy pulled off in California after having lost the 1968 primary in Oregon, or the one Walter F. Mondale accomplished after having lost New Hampshire in 1984.

Mr. Clinton nevertheless is very popular in New Hampshire, a state that voted Republican in every election after 1944 (with the exception of the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964) until he came along. Mr. Clinton won New Hampshire in both the 1992 and 1996 general elections, and today Democrats hold both House seats and the governor’s chair.

Sen. Clinton is an exceedingly skillful political figure, but her candidacy right now resembles nothing quite as much as equipoise. That’s an irony for a candidate who, only a few months ago – before Sen. Obama jumped into the race, before Mr. Edwards found his voice – was planning a hurried but triumphal gallop through the primaries and caucuses. No one makes that assumption anymore, and yet Sen. Clinton is clinging to a campaign strategy based on that assumption. It can’t last, and it won’t.