Clinton Camp Aims to Minimize Differences With Obama on Iraq

When Clinton first traveled to Iowa as a candidate, she told state party officials that Democrats should be ready to "deck" any opponents who attack them and she stressed to members of the Democratic National Committee that she and her husband know how to fight and beat Republicans better than anyone else in the party.

When Geffen, an Obama supporter, offered a nasty critique of the candidate and her husband to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson issued a statement demanding that Obama renounce Geffen's support and return his money.

The Obama campaign responded in kind, and in the after-action analysis, neither campaign ended up pleased with the way events played out that day. Obama advisers regret rising to the bait while Clinton allies believe her campaign team sounded too shrill in defending the candidate and her husband. But that has not satiated the apparent appetite for combat between the two campaigns.

Clinton advisers offer no apologies for their aggressive posture. They argue that the only way for a Democrat to win in 2008 is to be prepared for Republican attacks and fight off those attacks as vehemently as necessary.

"We understand what it takes to get your message out," Penn said. "The opponents try to kill your message. You have to respond to what they say. You have to defeat it." Clinton, he added, is not going to be caught off guard by an attack that makes it difficult to get her own message through to the voters. "And I think that experience is absolutely critical to winning this White House," he said.

Obama chief strategist David Axelrod countered that the attack-and-counterattack politics Penn describes ultimately will reinforce the climate Obama hopes to change with his campaign. "If what we allow this election to become is one more war of attrition, one more battle of tactics, one more contest of who can use the most refined weapons of politics, we're going to do the same thing we've done in recent years," he said. "We're going to kill people's sense of idealism and hope."

Axelrod argued that what the country needs is a leader "who can get us to lower our voices and raise our sight." But Penn countered that the only way to do that is to drown out an opponent's attacks. To "get that message out, you have to defeat the Republican machine," he said.

Wolfson said that from the Clinton campaign's perspective, the incident was more about positions Democrats shared rather than their divisions.

"Mark was making clear that Senator Obama and Senator Clinton have had the same voting record in Congress on Iraq and that Democrats are united in seeking to bring an end to the war," he said. "As Democrats, our shared beliefs are much greater than our differences."