February 24, 2007	Saturday	Safar 6, 1428

NEW YORK: A Hollywood-style brawl with the campaign of rival Barack Obama is the latest in a series of speed bumps tripping up Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early presidential moves.

From the Clinton team’s decision to criticise — and therefore publicise — producer David Geffen’s recent complaints about both Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to increasingly skeptical questions about Sen. Clinton’s nuanced explanation of her 2002 vote authorising the Iraq war, it became apparent even a battle-tested front-runner can fall prey to missteps.

On top of that, voters were reminded of the downside of the first Clinton presidency.

“Her explanation for her Iraq vote sounds like the bad old days of Dick Morris triangulation,” said Marty Kaplan, a political communications professor at the University of Southern California. Morris, once an influential adviser to both Clintons who has since turned against the couple, urged President Clinton to make policy decisions by splitting the difference on opposing views.

Kaplan added, “She may have overreacted to Geffen in a way that showed she’s potentially thin-skinned. And the whole thing was a reminder that the issues of Monica Lewinsky and Whitewater are still out there.”

The latest spat began on Wednesday, when Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson called on Obama to disavow comments Geffen made in a New York Times interview.

Geffen, a onetime Clinton supporter who threw a $1.3 million fundraiser for Obama in Hollywood on Tuesday night, criticised Bill Clinton for “reckless” behaviour and called his wife polarising and dishonest. He also took her to task for refusing to recant her Iraq vote.

Obama ducked the controversy, saying he should not have to apologise for something he did not say. But his spokesman Robert Gibbs noted that Geffen had raised $18 million for Bill Clinton and had been invited to one of the infamous Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers that helped define the Clinton fundraising excesses of the 1990s.

The brouhaha reflected the Clinton campaign’s annoyance with what it perceives as the national media’s favourable treatment of Obama.

The tit-for-tat between campaign operatives helped the story to explode nationally — overshadowing a Democratic presidential forum in Nevada that all the candidates except Obama attended.

Ironically, that lack of attention may have helped Clinton, who was pointedly jabbed by rival John Edwards for her unwillingness to revisit her war stance.

Edwards, a former North Carolina senator who also voted to authorise the invasion, has repeatedly apologised for his vote and said Clinton’s decision not to do so was “between her and her conscience”.

With the early 2008 voting contests in Iowa and New Hampshire still a year away, the current turbulence on the campaign trail is largely the province of hard-core political junkies.

Even so, the events of the last few days exposed the Clinton campaign’s sensitivity to criticism of her husband’s White House years the growing appeal of Obama —and to some extent, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards —among the party’s overwhelmingly anti-war activists.

“It’s time for a different kind of leadership in this country,” Edwards said, adding that voters want a president “who will tell the truth when they’ve made a mistake. Who will take responsibility when they’ve made a mistake.”

Clinton has been challenged to explain her vote at nearly every campaign stop since entering the presidential field last month.

She tried to put the matter to rest in New Hampshire last weekend, saying voters could choose another candidate if her answer does not suffice. Nevertheless, the questions persist.

Another headache emerged last week when Clinton was asked to renounce comments about Obama made by one of her South Carolina supporters. State Sen. Robert Ford, who is black, said he was endorsing Clinton in part because Obama as a black presidential candidate would hurt other Democrats on the ballot.

“Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose —because he’s black and he’s top of the ticket,” Ford said.

Ford later apologised as did a Clinton spokesman. But Clinton did not personally distance herself from it.

Raphael Sonenshein, a political scientist at California State University-Fullerton, said the Clinton campaign had seized on the Geffen comments as a prelude of what to expect later.

“This is a dress rehearsal, and it’s peanuts compared to what Republicans will do in the general election,” he said. “She knows she’ got to come out and come out strong.”—AP