LAST November, at about seven in the morning, I remember trying to ask Hillary Clinton a quick question as she swept out of a hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, and into a waiting car. Her press people said the BBC would not buy any favours with the Hillary team by shoving a microphone under the former first lady's nose. Instead they said we might like to drive across town, to the Drake Diner on 25th Street, where we could film Senator Clinton having breakfast. There we found her chatting to some people just off the nightshift - people among her core constituency. The thing that I remember most was her failure to look people in the eye as she spoke to them. There was nothing shifty about this. I was just surprised she was not a little better at the personal touch. In fact, in those early days some argued there was a certain arrogance about the Hillary campaign. Her campaign strategy of painting herself as "experienced" enough to do the job from day one, inadvertently helped to reinforce the point. That has proven costly in a country where the electorate as a whole is unhappy with the way politicians - from both main parties - are running things. Douglas Schoen, a pollster and political strategist who worked on Bill Clinton's successful re-election in 1996, believes that Barack Obama's nomination proves that the electorates want something different this year. "I think he has come up with a big idea, which is that people are angry, they want an outsider, they want change, they want conciliation, they want bipartisan solutions. "The tragedy of the Hillary camp is that the bipartisanship that she represented in Washington has gone unrecognised on the stump. The advocacy of change that she has represented throughout her whole career has not been fully reflected, and I think in retrospect her campaign has not been able to get that message across as compellingly as perhaps Barack Obama did." It has been hard for much of the establishment to break from the Clintons, as was evidenced by the length of time it took Senator Obama to persuade the super-delegates to swing his way. Senator Clinton also clearly has huge support across the country - she did not lose the nomination by all that much. Many people would say that, if anything, she has enhanced her own personal standing. She also remains, her supporters say, a committed advocate of change and it is hard to see her bowing out of public life. She still commands significant influence in the party and the country. But it is Obama who will now be portrayed by his supporters as the Democratic Party's trail-blazer. Many will see him as the new face of Democratic politics, a break from the past, a breath of fresh air.   In that sense, and especially if Obama is successful and wins the White House, perhaps a new era has indeed been ushered in.                                       - BBC