Blame Game in Hillaryland

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Make of it what you will, but one Clinton bigwig, Harold Ickes, has come out swinging against another, an even bigger one, Mark Penn.

"Mark Penn has run this campaign," Ickes told The New York Observer. Which, on the surface, isn't much of an insult -- until you consider that it's been a campaign that turned Clinton the frontrunner into Clinton the desperate loser of 11 contests in a row, a failure of a campaign that now stands on the verge of defeat, a campaign that may come to an utterly inglorious end if things don't go well next week in Ohio and Texas.

Ickes has his own agenda, of course, not to mention a reputation to try to preserve, and he is now pointing fingers, laying the blame squarely on Penn's head -- and Penn may very well deserve much (or most) of the blame (as Arianna suggests), though there is surely enough blame to go around.

There is still hope for Clinton -- the race isn't over yet -- but, evidently in anticipation of what is looking more and more like an inevitably bad conclusion to its campaign, one that it fully deserves, the blame game has begun in earnest.

This is just the beginning.