There is only one way forward for Clinton now

 Hillary Clinton speaks on Tuesday night after the New Hampshire primary. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)In the days before Bernie Sanders positively obliterated Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, raising the very real specter that she could lose the nomination, I found myself thinking a lot about an exchange she had with voters during a CNN town hall in Derry.A tired-looking man rose and told Clinton he had terminal colon cancer, and he wanted to know what she would do to help advance the conversation about end-of-life decisions. Clinton seemed visibly moved.

“I don’t have an easy or glib answer for you,” Clinton said candidly, adding that she needed to immerse herself in the ethical and scientific writings.Not five minutes later, another voter asked Clinton how she would stand up to Republican attacks. She scoffed knowingly and let loose a recitation of how victimized she had been over the years, and how horrible it was to be the target of smear campaigns, and how she was still standing anyway. “It’s unlike anything you’ve ever gone through,” Clinton said.I thought to myself: Tell that to the guy with colon cancer.A better politician would have said yes, of course she’d have to deal with some attacks, but that’s life in the arena and she feels lucky to serve. A great politician, like her husband in his prime, would have actually meant it.

But Hillary, truth be told, just isn’t a very gifted politician. And while Sanders focuses relentlessly on the big themes that preoccupy voters, Clinton’s campaign feels like it’s all about her — her résumé, her mettle, her 25 years of suffering through the indignities of public service. “I’m with her” is the slogan for a campaign that seems to signify nothing beyond the joyless accretion of personal loyalties.

Clinton really should beat Sanders in the weeks ahead, but she has only one clear winning strategy here, near as I can tell. She has to stop allowing the campaign to become a referendum on her — and turn it, instead, into a referendum on the guy she wants to replace.

That won’t be Clinton’s instinct, of course. The first thing she’s going to do now, apparently, is the thing the Clintons have generally done when backed against a wall: blame the staff.

Even before New Hampshire buried Clinton in bad news, handing her a 22-point defeat in which she even lost women by double digits, stories were circulating about a shakeup at the Brooklyn headquarters (where, you would think, Clinton’s high command now feels like the Lost Battalion caught behind enemy lines, surrounded by turtleneck-wearing hipsters with “Bernie” signs in their windows).

All of which reminds me of what a scandal-damaged Gary Hart said in 1988 when his chief operative in Iowa, a young law student named Martin O’Malley, informed him that he had registered at zero percent in the caucuses and apologized for letting him down.

“Martin,” Hart said dryly, “this was not an organizational problem.”

Clinton doesn’t have an organizational problem. Oh, sure, there are probably too many informal advisers, too much conflicting advice, no shortage of arrogance and infighting. But that’s nothing new in the Clinton orbit. Only the cast of characters ever changes, and even then not much.

No, Clinton’s problem is the moment and her inability to meet it. What happened in New Hampshire Tuesday wasn’t just some ideological rebellion in both parties, a predictable insider-outsider conflict with less predictable results.