He's a Mac, and she's a PC -- not any PC -- perhaps a Gateway rapidly devolving into, say, a Commodore. How did this happen? Just six months ago, she was the cutting-edge, gleaming, leading brand, and her challenger was an unknown mumbling in a garage somewhere.

How has Hillary Clinton fallen so far so fast, while Barack Obama keeps gaining momentum? Any fair observer would admit that there is not much difference between the two on policy; the difference is in style and presentation, much like two similar laptops. Whereas the golden boy, with his even keel, gradual reveal and preternatural elegance and calm, keeps evolving into the Apple of our eye, she's stumbling, changing models, adding weird, outdated peripherals, like the poignant PC guy with the webcam strapped to his head.

One problem is her tin ear. Hillary is the only person on Earth who can make "I'll see you in Ohio!" sound like a threat. In their debate last week in Cleveland, she opened scrappily, getting into some tough-guy arguing with Obama over healthcare. By the second question (on NAFTA, which put her in an awkward position), she started complaining about her unfair treatment by the media. She said she found it curious that she always gets the first question on "all of these issues, but I'd be happy to answer it," which deflated the complaint, and turned her into a passive-aggressive victim, especially since it was said with a disingenuous smile. Then she raced straight into a reference to a recent Saturday Night Live skit that made fun of the press fawning all over Obama. ("Maybe we should ask Barack is he's comfortable and if he needs another pillow," she zinged.) No one in the hall got it, perhaps because every pop-culture joke she tries to make falls flat, unless it's delivered to a crowd of roaring supporters. At the debate, it sunk and went clunk.

What's more, despite her talk of experience, she is uniquely compromised as a presidential candidate precisely because eight years of it came as First Lady. Combine that with the fact that as the first serious female presidential contender, she is a walking Rorschach test, a lightning rod for all women, and that's a real bind.

Clinton is notoriously polarizing; I myself have run the love/hate gamut with her. Ten years ago, I was furious at her for staying in the marriage. When it all worked out and she became the senator from New York, she made me feel resentful, and regret my own choices. Since then, she has turned me around once again: I've been impressed with her hard work, diligence and grace. Lately, I've just felt sorry for her. And even though the last thing I want to do is blame the press and say it's been sexist, I have to agree that it has been unfair.

Women identify with Hillary Clinton, yes, and that's certainly one of her strengths, but it's also a profound source of her troubles. Educated, successful, upper-middle-class white women (many of whom are found in the media) identify perhaps a little too strongly with her. Consider two recent examples: Katie Couric and Tina Fey.

First Katie. In leaving Today and accepting the anchor gig on the CBS Evening News, Couric made her own "first woman" headlines, breaking up a longstanding male power triad.

You don't have to be trained in Freudian analysis to see the career parallels: Taking a page from the way Hillary started her political campaign, Couric initiated her own "listening tour."

Within the first month, all the listening-tour-based initiatives fell by the wayside, as did her much-mocked quest to come up with a viewer-generated sign-off. ("I'll see you tomorrow," seems to be the wacky, mold-breaking phrase she ended up with.)

For Couric, breaking into the Edward R. Murrow-worshipping CBS News culture as a highly paid morning show diva has proven prickly and complicated, with some of the 60 Minutes crew even taking pay cuts to accommodate her hire. Not surprisingly, she's the source of much inside-the-network sniping, and was quoted in a profile in New York magazine as second-guessing the whole move.

Perhaps that's why, in a 60 Minutes interview with the senator on Super Tuesday, she kept at the same question, like a dog with a slipper, about whether Hillary ever wanted to give up. Despite the barrage, Hillary remained positive.

"...The only way I know how to do it is to believe with all my heart that I'm going to be successful… So I don't entertain the other option," Sen. Clinton responded, and I believed her. I was impressed.

But Katie was not done.

"Even in your deepest, darkest moments, when you're exhausted, you don't think, 'Oh my gosh, I'm going through this… I'm so tired and this could be all for naught?'" Couric asked. "You have to, once in a while, think that. No?"

"No, Katie," Clinton said, yet again. "You can't think like that. You have to believe you're going to win…Otherwise leave the field and let somebody who has the confidence and the optimism and determination that a leader has to have get on that field instead."

Wow. I thought -- perfect response. And here's where the sexism comes into play. At that point, any other reporter would have moved on to another, more important subject, like her favorite color. But I guess Katie was tired that day, and feeling sorry for herself.

"How do you do it? I mean, the satellite interviews, the speeches, the travel, the debates, the schmoozing, the picture taking, 24/7," Couric asked. "I'm talking about pure stamina."

Would Couric have asked a male candidate about his "stamina?" Or get into the minutiae of vitamin and coffee intake? Doubtful. But Hillary, showing no exasperation with her interviewer, gamely mentioned giving up diet soda and drinking tons of water.

Then she offered Katie her "two secrets to staying healthy": frequently washing her hands and eating a lot of hot peppers.

With that, I knew it was over. Couric succeeded in bringing Hillary's vigorous image to slaughter. It was as if we were visiting grandma, and she was in her housedress with pepper juice running down the front.

Would 1960s and 1970s feminists like Gloria Steinem ever have predicted that it would take a woman who has herself pierced the glass ceiling to turn back time while interviewing a female presidential hopeful?

By the end of the takedown, Couric still had a few "just us girls" arrows in her quiver. "What were you like in high school? Were you the girl in the front row taking meticulous notes and always raising your hand?" she asked, suggesting that she herself was a bit of a bad girl -- so much cooler than studious, Coke-bottle-glasses Hillary.

"Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?" Couric asked.

"Only with some boys," Clinton laughed. And with that entirely gratuitous question, Couric became one of the boys.

But even when a powerful, successful woman sticks her neck out in the New York senator's defense, it still somehow backfires.

That's the case with Tina Fey, the smart, funny, thirtysomething who was the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live before becoming co-producer/writer/star of 30 Rock and the subject of her very own "How does she do it?" American Express commercial. She seems to have returned to guest host the first post-writers' strike edition of SNL specifically to stump for Hillary.

There was the opening segment parodying the free ride (and swooning) the adoring press was giving Obama.

Later in the show, during "Weekend Update," Fey came on with a bit called "Women's News." This by itself was meant to be post-post-feminist ironic, I suppose, since the idea of "women's pages" as a separate entity was thrown out of most newspapers by the late 1970s.

"It's a great time to be a lady," she opened, "and not just because of that new yogurt that helps you poop."

She made a couple of jokes about Kirstie Alley's fat and Oprah's power, and then got to the meat:

"Finally, the most important women's news item there is. We have our first serious female presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton," she said, "and yet women have come so far as feminists that they don't feel obligated to vote for a candidate just because she's a woman..."

Well, yeah. The reality is that there are so many anomalies, hypocrisies and brain-busters involved in supporting not just any female candidate, but Hillary. She mentioned Bill. ("Are you weirded out that they're married?" she asked. "'Cause they're having the same amount of sex that George and Jeb Bush are.")

The marriage, of course, is some sort of Faustian bargain that most people not as in control of their ambitions and emotions as Hillary have a hard time understanding. But at this point, consciously or not, it seems that Bill's latest politicking for his wife has undermined her, and firmly reestablished Clinton fatigue in our minds.

Why has he been allowed to talk and talk? Had it been a reverse situation, and had the female half of the pair gone off the rails as consistently, the campaign would have shot her with a tranquilizer dart and dragged her off to an asylum.

Wanting to cover every pocket of possible Hillary resistance, however, Fey seemed to think that an exegesis about bitches would help.

"What bothers me the most is when people say that Hillary is a bitch. … Yeah, she is. And so am I. … Bitches get stuff done," she explained, and then riffed on about "mean nuns who sleep on cots and are allowed to hit you…''

All irony and post-modern joking aside, the takeaway was that Hillary is that teacher with the rules that you hated. Not much of an improvement on Katie.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has consistently given Hillary a pounding; and in a column last week she wrote about all of Hillary's different voices -- "It's My Turn Hillary, Cuddly Hillary, Let's Get Down in the Dirt and Fight Like Dogs Hillary." Dowd suggested that Clinton has "turned into Sybil." The criticism, of too many voices, and shrill, whiny ones at that, seems a tad sexist to me.

But Dowd did make a decent point: "Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do. It is only because of the utter open-mindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender." Indeed, this Tuesday's primaries might make all the Hillary analysis moot.

Obviously, there's more to Hillary's problems than the media coverage. The New York Times two weeks ago recounted her campaign's financial missteps, including $100,000 for party platters in Iowa. Costlier still was failing to plan past Super Tuesday and underestimating her opponent. Obama seems to have raised money and spent it far more effectively, and flat out run a better campaign.

In the end, I'm afraid, it all comes down to image: Sister Frigidaire versus the Boy King. Obama certainly doesn't have a great product name, but that doesn't seem to matter: He's a cultural phenom. Like the very democratic iPod, he has broadened the market, bringing in a youthful demo, first-time voters and independents. We seem to want to "think different" and buy into the cooler package.