WASHINGTON - A key advisor to Barack Obama quit Friday, after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" and sparking a new Iraq war policy row, as the hyper-competitive Democratic White House race took another nasty twist.
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 explosive 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 f***d 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," Power was quoted as saying.
"She is a monster, too -- that is off the record -- she is stooping to anything," Power said.
"You just look at her and think 'Ergh.'"
Power afterward issued a statement through the Obama campaign 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 when she resigned.
Power also caused a stir in an interview with the BBC in which she appeared to suggest Obama might water down a vow to get US combat 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" said Power in the interview.
"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 Power had been exposed by inadequacies in the Illinois senator'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 on a conference call organized by the Clinton campaign.
"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 wasnt 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 while campaigning 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."
"I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009."
Rubin tied the affair to the row last week over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) last week when the Obama campaign was accused of telling Canada the candidate's fierce anti-NAFTA rhetoric was for political positioning.
"It's amateur hour on making foreign policy," said Rubin.
Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe however said that Obama's Iraq war vow was a "rock-solid commitment."
The latest nasty twist to the campaign came a day after the New York senator's camp accused Obama's team of acting like special prosecutor Ken Starr, the nemesis of her husband former president Bill Clinton, in its attempts to force her to publish her tax returns.
Power made her comments as she was interviewed in London promoting her book on UN representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad in 2003.
Power is a professor of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Her previous book "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," won the Pulitzer Prize.
As the controversy raged, Clinton and Obama meanwhile held dueling rallies in the western state of Wyoming, a Republican stronghold, which holds the next voting showdown in the Democratic race on Saturday.
The state is holding caucuses, a voting method which normally favors Obama, has only 12 elected nominating delegates available, and will be followed by the more significant Mississippi primary on Tuesday, where Obama is also favored.
col/pmh

03/07/2008 23:03 GMT