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The recriminations start

James Forsyth

Thursday, 28th February 2008

Hillary Clinton might still be in the race but some of her top advisors have already started to argue about who will be to blame if she loses. Yesterday, Mark Penn (pictured), her chief strategist, was quoted in The New York Observer saying that his message had worked just fine and suggesting that what had been lacking was some organisational savvy. Today, Harold Ickes, a veteran Clinton fixer, has been shooting back. He told The New York Observer that “Besides Hillary Clinton, he [Penn] is the single most responsible person for this campaign” having told The New York Times that “She is better than her campaign”. One doesn’t need a degree in reading between the lines to work out the implication of these two statements when taken together.

The problem for Hillary Clinton is that this adds to the feeling that it is all over for her—70 percent of Democrats now think Obama is most likely to win the nomination—which could further depress her support. Also the press love this kind of story and are going to constantly return to it over the next few days making it even harder for Hillary’s actual message to break through.