Even in Victory, Clinton Team Is Battling Itself

But there is a Penn camp, however small, that believes in his message of strength, experience, and fear of recession and crisis -- and its most important members are Bill and Hillary Clinton. Three times, campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle and senior adviser Harold Ickes tried to hire another national pollster so Penn would not be the one to test his own message, campaign sources said, and three times they were rejected. When the candidate forced out Solis Doyle last month after a string of defeats, the departing manager said Penn should also be fired, to no avail, sources said.

Penn declined to respond when reached yesterday, but he has been firing back in conversations with compatriots in recent days, 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. "Mark Penn's point is: 'I didn't do any of the spending,' " said a campaign colleague who has heard the argument. "Penn's whole point is: 'To say I had control of the money is crazy. Patti was in charge.' "

And so strangely enough, a moment of victory for the Clinton camp somehow feels less than victorious. "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."

'Resentment Within the Campaign'

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, Clinton looked as though she would lose the New Hampshire primary the next day, a defeat that could be fatal to her presidential bid. Penn sat on his bed in his hotel room and drafted a plan for how to go forward.

He had no idea whether he would be around to execute such a strategy. Exasperated, Hillary and Bill Clinton were sketching out a staff shake-up. They would bring in former aides, such as Douglas B. Sosnik and Steve Ricchetti, two of the "White Boys," as her staff still called his advisers from their White House days. Hillary Clinton would ask her former chief of staff, Maggie Williams, to effectively take over, although Solis Doyle would keep her title. "People are telling me the campaign's not working, and I've got to show I'm making changes," Clinton told aides.

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."

Penn has been a lightning rod ever since the 1996 campaign. More comfortable with data than people, he promoted a centrist approach that was policy-driven and successful but bloodless. He earned a passel of enemies along the way. Longtime Clinton advisers such as Ickes, James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, John Podesta and Paul Begala openly despise him, and some even nicknamed him "Schlumbo." Ickes and others tried unsuccessfully to get Penn fired from Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign.

Penn did not make a lot of new friends in his latest campaign, arguing against any apologies for Clinton's vote to go to war with Iraq and generating resentment with PowerPoint survey presentations that did not give colleagues the data they sought. He chastised a campaign aide who described him in a campaign document as "pollster" instead of his title "chief strategist." At the same time, Penn's firm has taken in $10 million from the campaign, the vast bulk of which has gone to direct mail and polling, with about $240,000 for the consulting team. But defenders point to the strategist's record of success and say opponents are too focused on personality.

In the end, New Hampshire delivered a stunning upset victory for Clinton, and she pulled back on part of her shake-up plan. The newcomers would come on board, but everyone already there would stay. "I'm not dead," a relieved Penn told a colleague as votes came in. Williams joined the team but was assigned to specific projects such as youth outreach and surrogate speakers.

The campaign managed to build on its momentum by going next to Nevada, where it won another surprise victory on Jan. 19 despite Obama's support from key unions. But next up was South Carolina, where the African American vote was dominant in Democratic primaries. A serious debate ensued about how much to invest in the state. Strategists wanted to target specific congressional districts where they might pick up delegates but limit their time there.

"Bill Clinton just aggressively disagreed," said a top campaign official involved in the discussion. "He was like, 'No, I'm going to South Carolina and it's stupid to cede it.' I think it was personal for him. He was not about to lose the African American vote he had spent so long" courting. So he went to South Carolina and stayed.

The campaign had long ago discovered its limitations in dealing with the former president. He was, after all, no ordinary candidate's spouse. Her aides had become irritated trying to prod his staff to hire a new press secretary and complained that they had a hard time getting one of their own people onto his airplane to keep him on message. For their part, Bill Clinton's people viewed her staff warily, grousing that they never consulted him through much of 2007 or even showed him a calendar of events.