Clinton Campaign At War...With Self

OK...another short diary.  I haven't seen this posted here but I think this has value...if only schadenfreude.  Apparently, Hillary's "victory" has not staunched the flow of blood in her own camp.

Here's the WaPo story that is headlined on HuffPo this morning.

WaPo...Hillary's Staff At War With Itself

It seems as if there are VERY serious fault lines that appear to be getting worse even in victory.

More after the flip

As one can see, the fault lines have Mark Penn as the epicenter.

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.

Apparently many, if not most, of her high ranking advisers would like for Penn to go and according to the article, Penn has been doing all he can to foist blame on everyone else around him

But it's not just Penn.  At the same time as the Penn contretemps (all the time, apparnetly), according to the article, Bill has been running somewhat amuck.  

"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. "The greatest challenge going into the campaign," a senior campaign aide said with a sigh, "was the management of Bill Clinton."

This story goes on to highlight other major problems within the campaign staff currently.  It definitely seems like it's pulled in several directions.  I don't want to quote too much, given copyright strictures but you have to check out the delicious "eff you" ballet that gets discussed deep in the article.

This seems very much like a house divided.  Deeply fractured.  Sorry the diary is so short.  I thought that this story would have been diaried already.  I have't seen it though.  It's a must read if one is looking at the infrastructre of the campaigns.