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Worn down by 20-hour days and foreboding polls, Sen. Hillary Clinton lost her grip the other day.

She was sitting in a coffee shop in Portsmouth, N.H., for an intimate chat with 16 women voters, plus 100 of her closest friends from the media. A voter about Clinton's age — 60 — asked, basically, how she manages to get out of bed every morning, and "Who does your hair?"

That's when it happened — something we thought nobody could get the cool, collected former first lady to do in public — not Monica or Paula, not Gennifer or even scary Ken Starr.

As the networks waited and shutters clicked away, Clinton tried to joke her way out of it. But contemplating the deeper question, and perhaps the totality of her topsy-turvy political fortunes, her voice faltered, her eyes glistened, and she appeared to teeter on the brink of tears.

For any other candidate, it would have been recognized as a humanizing moment, a glimpse of vulnerability, despite the no-crying-in-politics rule.

Then again, this was Hillary, so commentators had but one question.

"Was it genuine?" a CNN anchor asked. A New York newspaper: "Real or scripted?" And so on, in varying degrees: A performance. Playing the gender card. A desperate, transparent ploy by "Chillary" to gain last-minute votes.

Hence, the whole problem with a woman for president, and this woman in particular. If she appears too in control, she's flinty and calculating — or as blogger Andrew Sullivan recently put it, "Cheney in a pantsuit."

If, on the other hand, she appears to lose control, ever so slightly, she's flinty and calculating — or as Rush Limbaugh put it, crying "crocodile tears" for a "sympathy play."

Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't. In the end, just plain damned. And even if Clinton maintains her comeback, it's a cliffhanger of a lead that can't afford the ghost of a misstep.

Two days before the coffee shop confidential, pundits were already dissecting Clinton's Saturday night debate performance as "shrill" — an adjective reserved for the senator.

And in the days leading up to New Hampshire, commentators revisited a phenomenon of "the Clinton Cackle," which had been the subject of an entire analysis in The New York Times. The senator's occasional loosing of a belly laugh — a shrill one, no doubt — was likened to the Howard Dean scream. The kind of trifle, come to think of it, elections come down to.

But tears, not laughter, is what we wanted, and tears is what we got. Almost. And all things considered, it's a wonder she kept it together this long.

People should have seen this coming when Clinton last weekend winged Chris "Hardball" Matthews during a session with reporters. As Matthews pushed her to contrast her war policies to Barack Obama's, Clinton reminded Matthews that this wasn't his show.

Come on the show, Matthews prodded.

"Well, right," Clinton replied dismissively. "I don't know what to do with men who are obsessed with me. Honestly. I've never understood it."

It was a joke, of course, maybe even punctuated by a cackle, but there was some truth to it. In a campaign that started out under so much scrutiny that even her cleavage was fair game, the truth is, a lot of people have a dislike of Hillary Clinton that borders on the irrational.

And some of them are women.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com