More HRC Infighting?

By way of a shocked Brad DeLong:

Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut: For the bruised and bitter staff around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tuesday's death-defying victories in the Democratic presidential primaries in Ohio and Texas proved sweet indeed. They savored their wins yesterday, plotted their next steps and indulged in a moment of optimism. "She won't be stopped," one aide crowed.

And then Clinton's advisers turned to their other goal: denying Mark Penn credit.

With a flurry of phone calls and e-mail messages that began before polls closed, campaign officials made clear to friends, colleagues and reporters that they did not view the wins as validation for the candidate's chief strategist. "A lot of people would still like to see him go," a senior adviser said.

The depth of hostility toward Penn even in a time of triumph illustrates the combustible environment within the Clinton campaign, an operation where internal strife and warring camps have undercut a candidate once seemingly destined for the Democratic nomination. Clinton now faces the challenge of exploiting this moment of opportunity while at the same time deciding whether the squabbling at her Arlington headquarters has become a distraction that requires her intervention.

Many of her advisers are waging a two-front war, one against Sen. Barack Obama and the second against one another....

[W]hile many campaigns are beset by backbiting and power struggles, dozens of interviews indicate that the internal problems endured by the Clinton team have been especially corrosive. They fought over Penn's strategy.... They fought over deployment of assets and dwindling resources, pointing fingers over the failure to field organizations.... They fought over how to handle former president Bill Clinton....

At the center of much of this turmoil has been Penn, the rumpled, brusque, numbers-crunching strategist respected even by his foes for his intelligence, if not his social graces. A trusted adviser to the Clintons since helping orchestrate Bill Clinton's reelection campaign in 1996, Penn mapped out a strategy emphasizing strength and experience and, in the view of critics, did not adjust adequately.... "I think about all camps think it's Mark's fault," said a Clinton White House veteran close to the campaign. "I don't think there is a Mark camp." Another person who has advised the senator from New York said: "Penn should have been let go. He failed the campaign in developing a message and evolving the message as things changed."...

Penn... has been firing back... arguing that he never had control of the campaign's finances or organization, instead blaming Ickes, Solis Doyle and her deputy, Mike Henry, who resigned.... And so strangely enough, a moment of victory for the Clinton camp somehow feels less than triumphal. "Mark blames Patti and Patti blames Mark in a circular firing squad," said an adviser who has worked for both Clintons and watched Penn, Solis Doyle, Ickes, Wolfson, Grunwald and others go at it for months. "What they don't realize is that everyone else blames them -- all of them."...

The Centennial Hotel in Concord, N.H., was a grim place the night of Jan. 7. Fresh off a third-place finish in Iowa on Jan. 3.... When word got around, there was a "parade to the doorstep" of the candidate by other top aides urging her to keep Solis Doyle or accept their resignations, a senior adviser said. "There was virtual universal agreement that if there was fault, it should be laid at the door of Mark Penn, not Patti Solis Doyle," the adviser said. "People thought change should be made, but the wrong person was being fired. And it created enormous resentment within the campaign."...

"The greatest challenge going into the campaign," sighed a senior campaign aide, "was the management of Bill Clinton."... "You had your Hillary people, and you had your Bill people," said the top campaign official. "There were some crossovers, but very few. The Hillary people could never tell him to cut the [crap] because they were Hillary people -- and vice versa."...

During South Carolina, Clinton friends in Massachusetts such as longtime operative John Sasso and former Kennedy family aides began blitzing the Arlington headquarters with warnings that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) was planning to endorse Obama. But the camp was slow to react, they complained. "People in Boston were apoplectic," a Clinton fundraiser said. "I got the sense it never got high enough up in the organization. And then they realized, 'Oh, my God, this can't be happening.'"...

Clinton, feeling burned by Iowa, had become allergic to caucuses, deeming them unfair. Ickes and political director Guy Cecil argued that such states were important because even if she lost, she would pick up delegates with a strong showing.... "That was one of the biggest blunders we had," a senior official said.

Obama invested in Idaho, for example, while Clinton did not and as a result he won 15 delegates to her three. In New Jersey, on the other hand, Clinton won 59 delegates to 48 for Obama. So the net 12 delegates Obama picked up in Idaho offset the 11 net delegates she earned in the much bigger state of New Jersey. "You end up canceling out everything we had done in New Jersey," said Hassan Nemazee, the campaign's finance co-chairman. "All that work in New Jersey was essentially nullified"...