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Recriminations watch

James Forsyth

Monday, 3rd March 2008

With less than 24 hours to go before Texas and Ohio vote, the Clinton campaign desperately wants to be driving its message about Obama’s lack of national security experience and his double-talk on Nafta. But instead, the chatter is about the blame game inside her campaign.

Amazingly, Mark Penn — Hillary’s chief strategist — emailed the LA Times at the weekend to say that he had "no direct authority in the campaign" and was just "an outside message advisor with no campaign staff reporting to me." He went on to note that he has:

"...had no say or involvement in four key areas -- the financial budget and resource allocation, political or organizational sides. Those were the responsibility of Patti Solis Doyle, Harold Ickes and Mike Henry, and they met separately on all matters relating to those areas."

The rest of the Clinton campaign seems to have been taken aback by Penn’s statement. Howard Wolfson, the top press guy for Clinton, told the paper that Penn was in charge of both strategy and message.

This kind of story, which is popping up with ever increasing regularity in the press, is a nightmare for the campaign as they are cat nip to journalists and distract from Hillary’s actual message. Penn’s comments were particularly idiotic as he has been such a public face of the campaign. He is also someone many people love to hate, so whenever he does something like this it is going to set off a protracted back and forth. If Hillary doesn’t have the space to ram home her closing argument today, Penn will have to take much of the blame.