'Chaos' in Hillary's Campaign

Billary has run out of bullets. The fact that they went after Obama on the drug issue proves that they are desperate:

The bickering is far from over in Camp Clinton, insiders say, even as staffers closed ranks in an effort to leave last week's campaign gaffes in the past.

"They're in chaos - there's definite friction at the top between [Clinton spokesman] Howard Wolfson and [chief strategist] Mark Penn," said a source close to the campaign.

"Clinton's doing the best she can to get back on message, but her top echelon's distracted by its own power struggle, as opposed to worrying about her," the source said, adding that a serious staff shakeup was unlikely, but "an old Clinton ally could be brought in to mediate between Wolfson and Penn."

Another former Bill Clinton strategist called attempts to malign Sen. Barack Obama's credibility with voters "idiotic."

"Who cares what Obama was writing when he was in kindergarten?" said the analyst, referring to recent Clinton reports that Obama from an early age had shown an interest in running for president.

"And now we're moving up the food chain to what he did in high school? It's an idiotic strategy, and it came at the wrong time for her."

It's so bad Bill has gotten into involved in the dispute:

Bill Clinton has finally succumbed to temptation and intervened personally to salvage his wife's faltering bid for the White House, according to leaks from her secretive campaign team.

The exasperated former President has clashed with some of Hillary Clinton's closest advisors over strategy, after their recent attacks on Barack Obama, her main rival for the Democratic nomination, backfired.

He is said to be increasingly impatient that a series of campaign blunders is undermining her once comfortable lead in the opinion polls.

The myth of a superior Clinton campaign team has been destroyed. For weeks pundits have been talking about how team Hillary would destroy all competition. Now they've imploded:

He is understood to be particularly frustrated that her chief strategist and polling guru, Mark Penn, chose to portray the former First Lady as the "inevitable" and "invincible" nominee - a strategy that Mr Clinton believes has failed to sell her merits as a candidate.

Indeed, in the frank new television interview, he said it would now be a "miracle" if she won the key first caucus state of Iowa as he attempts to re-position her in voters' minds as a challenger, rather than running like an incumbent.

Mrs Clinton was forced to deny her White House run was in disarray on Friday when asked about the reports of campaign turmoil.

If you are naive enough to believe that the Clinton campaign hierarchy were not involved in the spreading drug use rumors, hopefully you will be convinced otherwise by this article:

Edwards strategist Joe Trippi called Mark Penn, his counterpart on the Clinton campaign, "unconscionable" on Saturday for dropping the word "cocaine" during a Thursday television appearance.

"On Thursday, as many of you know, on 'Hardball,' I was there when I thought [Clinton strategist] Mark [Penn] raised it again in a way that I thought was unconscionable and makes you wonder," Trippi told ABC News.

"We believe," he continued, "that that has no place and we have continued to try to make any differences we talk about be . . . differences on philosophy . . . and differences on policies, like health care. We'll continue to do that. . . To raise these other issues, many of them have no place and we're not going to participate other than, like I said, when I was there with Mark Penn, we are going to, when we can, call it out, and say, 'stop,' which is what I did on that show."

Penn used the word "cocaine" while he, Trippi, and Obama strategist David Axelrod were being jointly interviewed on MSNBC's "Hardball." The cocaine reference came as Penn was arguing that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., was not interested in raising Sen. Barack Obama's, D-Ill., high-school drug use.

"The issue related to cocaine use is not something the campaign is in any way raising," said Penn on "Hardball."

Trippi, who was standing next to Penn, seized on the use of the word "cocaine" as evidence that the Clinton team was intentionally trying to associate Obama with his past drug use even after the campaign had accepted the resignation of Bill Shaheen, the New Hampshire campaign co-chairman who first raised Obama's past drug use during a Wednesday interview with The Washington Post.

"I think he just did it again," said Trippi. "He just did it again."

"Unbelievable," he continued. "He just said cocaine again."