A key adviser to Senator Barack Obama quit on Friday after calling Senator Hillary Clinton a "monster" and sparking a new Iraq War policy row, as the hyper-competitive Democratic White House race took another nasty twist.
A day ahead of the next showdown, the caucuses in the western state of Wyoming, the Clinton camp crowed that it was "amateur hour" in the Obama campaign's foreign policy team, after Pulitzer Prize winner and Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power's remarks during a book tour in Britain.
The episode suggested the frustration in the Obama camp after the former first lady's comeback wins in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday revived her campaign.
"We fucked up in Ohio," Power told the Scotsman newspaper. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win."
"She is a monster, too -- that is off the record -- she is stooping to anything. You just look at her and think `Ergh,'" she said.
Power afterward issued a statement saying she was sorry, but Clinton's backers pounced in a conference call, and her resignation came within two hours.
"I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign," Power said.
Power, author of the acclaimed book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, also caused a stir in a BBC interview in which she appeared to suggest Obama might water down a vow to get US troops out of Iraq within 16 months of becoming president.
"He will of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a US senator," Power said. "You can't make a commitment ... in March of 2008, about what circumstances are going to be like in January 2009."
Former US State Department spokesman and Clinton advisor James Rubin said that Power had been exposed by inadequacies in Obama's foreign policy apparatus.
"I feel sorry for her, that she has been put in a position where he can't run a foreign policy team," Rubin said. "It's the man at the top who has not organized himself."
But Obama attempted to clarify the situation.
"Senator Clinton used this to try to imply that I wasn't serious about bringing this war to an end. I just have to mention this because I don't want anybody here to be confused," he said in Wyoming.
"It was because of George Bush with an assist from Hillary Clinton and [presumptive Republican presidential nominee] John McCain that we entered into this war," he said.
"I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009," he said.
Rubin tied the affair to the row last week over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) when the Obama campaign was accused of telling Canada their candidate's fierce anti-NAFTA rhetoric was for political positioning.
"It's amateur hour on making foreign policy," Rubin said.
The latest nasty twist came as a new poll showed the two deadlocked in their battle to represent the party in the Nov. 4 election.
A Newsweek poll released on Friday showed them in a virtual tie among Democratic voters, with Obama with 45 percent support against Clinton's 44 percent.
The two were also virtually equal on the issue voters see most important: the sagging economy.
Clinton and Obama were to face down yesterday in Wyoming, which offers only 12 delegates -- a candidate needs 2,025 to clinch the party's nod -- and again on Tuesday, in the more significant Mississippi primary, with 33 delegates.
Obama is favored in both, but with his delegate count at 1,581 and Clinton at 1,460, according to the independent Web site RealClearPolitics, neither contest will settle the fight.
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