If Hillary’s campaign falters and sputters on Tuesday, there will be a lot for campaign historians to pick over in these last days.

In her last debate, she mentioned the Saturday Night Live sketch that depicted the press as openly rooting for Obama. This past weekend, she appeared on the program, more or less endorsing a second sketch with a similar theme, depicting Brian Williams and Tim Russert as ganging up on her.

The ringing phone ad will spur a great deal of second-guessing. Besides being a cliche (Mondale 1984, Bush 1992) and resembling a children’s cold medicine commercial, I can’t help but notice that in the ad, no one actually picks up the phone until the end. (In the Hillary Administration, the crisis hotline will ring six times before Hillary answers, I guess.) Then, this ad opened up a new, fairly obvious question, that she and her campaign have seemed unprepared for:

Speaking with reporters on the plane, Clinton sidestepped a question about what moment in her career demonstrated her capacity to handle a foreign policy crisis. “That’s not the right question,” she said. “The question is: What have you done over the course of a lifetime to equip you for that moment?”

The question on Fox News Sunday was whether the panelists would still have a Democratic primary to talk about a week from now. No one jumped up and declared the question preposterous.

Finally, on Meet the Press, when Russert held his roundtable, I’ve never seen James Carville, the designated Hillary-defender, so tongue-tied. He had a tough hand to play, and he knew it.