WASHINGTON » If there was one moment recently in which President Barack Obama could have used Hillary Rodham Clinton’s help, it was on Sunday, as the president scrambled to salvage his trade deal, which had been halted by congressional Democrats.

Instead, Clinton, now running to replace Obama, all but wagged a finger at her former boss. Though she had once hailed the agreement as the gold standard for "free, transparent, fair trade," she bluntly suggested that the president should "listen to and work with" Democrats to improve the deal and ensure better protections for American workers.

If that cannot be done, Clinton said, "there should be no deal."

Her comments irked some White House aides, who were still stung by the setback on Capitol Hill and frustrated that Clinton, who once championed the president’s trade agenda, was now distancing herself from it. Over the weekend, one report on CNN documented 45 times when Clinton had expressed robust support for the trade pact, which the president is eager to see passed as part of his foreign policy legacy.

"The fact is, she was there when this thing was launched and she was extolling it when she left," David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, said Tuesday. "She’s in an obvious vise, between the work that she endorsed and was part of and the exigencies of a campaign. Obviously, her comments plainly weren’t helpful to moving this forward."

Senior White House aides, in their calmer moments, say they understand Clinton’s need to occasionally disagree with the president. They noted that Obama and his onetime secretary of state remain closely aligned on many issues. Even on the trade pact, Clinton did not say she flatly opposes the trade deal, leaving herself room to endorse it later.

But as she pursues the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton is confronting a stark reality: Building support for her candidacy must sometimes come at the expense of Obama, and sometimes even at the expense of the policies they had both pursued in the White House.

"The tension here is her moving from having been a spokesperson on behalf of this administration, a loyal lieutenant, to a presidential candidate," said Anita Dunn, a Democratic operative who served as Obama’s communications director in his first term. "That is a recipe for tension, misunderstanding and sometimes disgruntled feelings."

Clinton still praises the president under whom she served and is working assiduously to reach out to his coalition of African-American and young voters. The major policy addresses of her early campaign included speeches on civil rights and voting rights. And in her speech in New York on Saturday, Clinton praised Obama for pulling the country back from the brink of a depression, saving the auto industry and passing health care reform.

But while placing most of the blame on Republicans, and not criticizing Obama directly, she also painted a bleak picture of America during the president’s tenure. It remains a place, she said, of "displaced jobs and undercut wages," "too little investments in new businesses, jobs and fair compensation," and a political system that is "paralyzed by gridlock and dysfunction."

"We can’t stand by while inequality increases, wages stagnate and the promise of America dims," she said.

Those comments are somewhat less stark than those Sen. John McCain of Arizona sometimes made in 2008 about President George W. Bush, the fellow Republican he was running to succeed. After securing his party’s nomination in the summer of that year, McCain ran a television commercial that bluntly said that "we’re worse off than we were four years ago."

Clinton’s comments on trade echo a similar moment for her in the 2008 Democratic primary, when she found herself challenged by Obama about her early support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Her husband, President Bill Clinton, signed that agreement into law in 1993, but Democratic interest groups had soured on it.

"The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for president," Obama said about Clinton during their fight for the nomination.

In this campaign, Clinton’s aides concluded that attempts to criticize the administration could backfire, given that Clinton spent four years as Obama’s secretary of state. But they also decided she must not fall victim to the attack being made by Republicans: that electing her would usher in a third Obama term.

The aides knew the day would come when Clinton would have to irritate Obama in order to appease Democratic voters. They just did not think it would come quite so soon.

After her speech at an outdoor rally on Saturday, Clinton headed to Iowa to campaign. She had consulted with aides about how to address the president’s setback a day earlier on trade, a development that was dominating headlines in Washington.

Senior campaign officials for Clinton, many of whom have ties to Obama, had let the White House know that their candidate would be offering her views on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and on the proposal to give the president the authority to present the measure for an up-or-down vote in Congress. But the tone of her comments still struck some Obama supporters as lecturing.

Underscoring the trickiness of the issue, Clinton’s stance also did little to placate the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which has pushed her to come out against the trade pact and oppose efforts to give Obama the so-called fast-track authority.

In New Hampshire on Monday, after Clinton played down her comments about trade by referring to that authority as merely a "process issue," one of her Democratic opponents, Martin O’Malley, fired back.

"For the thousands of American workers whose jobs are on the line with TPP, fast track is not a ‘process’ issue, it’s a straightforward vote on their future and their livelihood," said Lis Smith, O’Malley’s deputy campaign manager.

Aides reject criticism that Clinton has avoided taking a firm position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in particular, or on trade in general. And White House officials say they believe Obama and Clinton remain in sync on overall trade goals.

"She has actually been very clear about where she stands on trade," John D. Podesta, the campaign chairman, told NBC’s "Meet the Press." "First, how does it grow jobs, grow wages and protect American workers, and second, does it protect our national security?"

But few people expect them to remain in sync for the next 17 months.

"This is a wide-open family feud," said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, a rare Democrat who supports Obama’s trade agenda. "She’s running for president. She has to do what she has to do."

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