US:STANDING ON the banks of Cape Fear river with a battleship in the background, Hillary Clinton was in her element as she addressed a crowd of 5,000 in the North Carolina port of Wilmington.
"Well, it's just another night in Paradise," trilled the candidate, who has spent the past 15 months flying around the country and surviving on three or four hours' sleep each night.
Watching her in Wilmington, it was hard to believe that Mrs Clinton is trailing Barack Obama by 15 points in North Carolina, where even her own staff admit she has little chance of winning next Tuesday's primary. Nor did the former first lady look like a woman whose presidential destiny, once viewed as inevitable, now requires little short of a political miracle to be fulfilled.
"As you can see, I'm having a great time," she said, before launching into an exhaustive list of policy prescriptions for everything from trade with China to the search for a cure for autism.
Mrs Clinton has put Ace Smith, one of her top campaign managers and the architect of her victories in California and Texas, in charge of her North Carolina campaign in the hope of keeping Mr Obama's margin of victory in the state within single digits.
If she narrows the gap in North Carolina and wins Indiana, which also votes next week, her campaign will be able to survive until June 3rd, when the final primaries are held. Thirty eight per cent of North Carolina's Democratic voters are African-American and Mr Obama expects to win most of the young, highly educated liberals around the research triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.
African-Americans make up 25 per cent of Wilmington's population but James Green was one of only a handful of blacks who came to hear Mrs Clinton.
"I don't care whether someone's African-American or white or whatever, it's the best person for the job. What I like about her is that, even though a lot of things aren't going her way, she's still fighting. You know, you need someone in the White House who's going to fight," he said.
If Mrs Clinton rescued her candidacy in New Hampshire by showing her softer side, she believes she won in Pennsylvania by portraying herself as tougher than her opponent and as a candidate who won't back down.
In Wilmington, she teased Mr Obama for turning down a chance to debate with her before next week's primaries and offered to meet him without a moderator, so the candidates could simply ask each other whatever they liked. "We can even do it on the back of a flatbed truck," she said.
Mrs Clinton's rhetoric has become muscular to the point of violence in recent weeks, as she promises to "obliterate" Iran if it launches a nuclear attack on Israel and vows to stand up to China over "lead-laced toys" and other abuses of trade relations.
Even on economic policy, there is blood in the air as she speaks of "going through the tax code with a scalpel".
Tough talk alone is unlikely to be enough to win her the Democratic nomination, however, and Mrs Clinton's best hope lies in keeping the race going long enough for doubts to grow about Mr Obama.
While Mrs Clinton was in Wilmington, Mr Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was in Detroit, addressing the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and he appeared yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington. Mr Wright is angry about the way clips from his old sermons have been edited and replayed on television to portray him as a racially divisive fanatic.
Mr Obama has distanced himself from the pastor's more controversial statements but Mr Wright appeared to dismiss the candidate's move as political manoeuvring. Yesterday, Mr Wright described attacks on him as attacks on the black church.
In Wilmington, Mrs Clinton didn't mention her opponent by name and ignored the controversy over Mr Wright but many in North Carolina are looking more closely at Mr Obama, according to Kathy Wallen, who came to the rally with her husband."He seemed to come out of nowhere all of a sudden and I'm not sure I know enough about him," she said.