Hillary Clinton will offer herself as the challenger in the face of Obama’s mounting momentum during Tuesday’s debate at Cleveland State University. Finger-pointing, frustration in Clinton camp

With a week to go before climactic tests in Texas and Ohio, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign team has slipped into full recriminations mode.

Looking backward, interviews with a cross-section of campaign aides and sympathetic outsiders suggest a team consumed with frustration and finger-pointing about the apparent failure of several recent tactical moves against Barack Obama.


Looking forward, it is clear Clinton’s team has only a faint and highly improvisational strategy about what to do over the next seven days. Simply put, there is no secret weapon.

At Tuesday night’s debate in Ohio, aides are mapping plans for drawing persistent attention to Obama’s record without attempting any knockout punch theatrics that could backfire.

Many recent decisions have done exactly that. This has left the campaign awash in anger over who is to blame.

Communications chief Howard Wolfson — echoing a strong belief of the Clintons themselves — blamed the news media Monday for allegedly tossing bouquets to Obama whenever he criticizes Clinton but writing that she is throwing low blows whenever she draws contrasts with him.

Top aides also are frustrated over the handling of a media uproar Monday regarding a photograph of Obama in traditional African dress during a visit to Kenya. It appeared splashed on the Drudge Report with the accusation that it was “circulated” by “Clinton staffers” over the weekend.

The debate over whether to deny responsibility or simply decline comment consumed the campaign at a moment when its remaining days to trip Obama’s sprint to the nomination are in the single digits.

Some Clintonites are disappointed with the candidate herself. Lines that were meant to be funny or show fighting spirit — “change you can Xerox” or “Shame on you, Barack Obama” — instead came off as peevish.

Her advisers acknowledge wearily that they have not cracked the code for deflating Obama. One of her slogans, “Solutions for America,” is meant to imply her opponent offers only empty rhetoric, while she would know what to do. But the campaign recognizes that has not always gotten through.

The campaign had a light moment Monday night when comedian and television host Ellen DeGeneres popped up via satellite at a Clinton fundraiser for a few minutes of upbeat banter with the candidate that is to be aired on DeGeneres’ show this week.

But mostly the campaign has become a grim slog. Unable to make anything stick, the campaign is throwing out a dizzying array of potential storylines each day.

A memo from Wolfson was headed: “Unanswered Questions by Obama on Outside Spending” by unions in Texas and Ohio.

“Simply put, Obama's trying to have it both ways, decrying political loopholes two months ago and using them to his advantage now,” Wolfson wrote. “That's hardly change you can believe in.”

But this storyline got little traction on a day when frazzled staffers at the campaign’s Northern Virginia headquarters were consumed by the Drudge photo controversy.

In what some aides now admit was a mistake, the campaign at first refused to comment on whether it had circulated the photo — not wanting to buy into the idea that the photo of African ceremonial garb showed anything negative.

Later, on a conference call, Wolfson denied involvement. “I have never seen that picture before. I'm not aware that anyone here has,” he said. “I'm not aware that anyone has sent any such e-mail.”

Talking points distributed to campaign surrogates say: “We have over 700 people on this campaign and I'm not in a position to know what each one of them may or may not have done. … I'm not in the position to ask 700 people to come in and answer questions about it. To put this as clearly and simply as I can: I was not aware of it, the campaign didn't sanction it and did not know anything about it.”

Encircled by second-guessers, Wolfson lashed out on a second conference call when a reporter asserted that the Clinton campaign’s “attempts to go negative and try to marginalize Obama's appeal” had not played very well.

“I think Sen. Obama's entire campaign against Sen. Clinton is negative,” Wolfson said. “I think he has run against her as the status quo. … He has essentially called her divisive. He has called her untruthful. He has questioned her credibility. He has said she will do or say anything to get elected. Now, if that's not negative, I don't know what negative is.”

Against that chaotic backdrop, Clinton will offer herself as the challenger in the face of Obama’s mounting momentum during Tuesday’s debate at Cleveland State University, to be shown live on MSNBC from 9 to 10:30 p.m. Eastern.

“She’s going to challenge in a healthy, successful way,” the senior adviser said. “Voters will see that she’s the right person to be commander in chief, the right person to manage the economy and the right person to beat John McCain. If the debate shows those three things, it’ll be a successful debate for her.”

Giving a foreign policy speech at The George Washington University on Monday, Clinton omitted a proposed line about not needing on-the-job training.

But, joined by senior retired military and defense officials, she asserted that her opponent “wavers from seeming to believe that mediation and meetings without preconditions can solve the world’s most intractable problems, to advocating rash unilateral military action.”

The senior adviser said proudly that the day had been “kind of a model” for the “mild contrast” that viewers are likely to see in the debate.

“She laid out her strong positive vision, and yet she used some contrast between who would be the best commander in chief,” the adviser said.

“She emphasized her strength as commander in chief, but she drew contrasts on experience and positions with both McCain and Obama. She laid out a strong, positive case, but she also drew some clear contrasts.”

That calibration was lost in some news coverage, though. “Another day, another attack from Hillary Clinton,” anchorman Charles Gibson said Monday at the start of ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

Such unsparing media coverage has helped embitter campaign staffers, some of whom refer to one cable network as the “Obama News Network.”

“Oftentimes, when she addresses her opponent, it’s immediately seized upon by the press as negative,” the adviser said. “When he makes personal character attacks, it’s often called ‘sharpening your rhetoric.’”

On Wednesday, Clinton will hold an economic summit in Ohio. After that, she’ll have a poverty tour in Appalachia.

“What she’s doing in this week is going through some of the major piece of why she should be president,” the adviser said. “She’d be a good commander in chief. She could manage the economy. She has a compassionate, caring view of the economy. Together, they’re a storyline of why she should be president.”