In a conference call just now, the Clinton campaign called on Barack Obama to fire Samantha Power for calling Hillary a “monster.”

There are advisers and then there are advisers. Power is Barack Obama’s Condi Rice.

A Harvard Law grad, former foreign correspondent, and Pulitzer Prize winning author, Power left her Harvard faculty gig to go work on Obama’s Senate staff for a year. It might be a little condescending to say she schooled him on foreign policy, but that’s close to accurate. In the constellation of Obama advisers, the 37-year-old Irish-born Power has as high a profile and as close a relationship to the candidate as anyone.

All of which is to say that her intemperate comments have put her and Obama in a bind — and the Clinton campaign knows it.

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed next month. Will the Administration release a declassified version of the key findings or keep it under wraps?

Samantha Power resigns.

Late Update: The Power kerfuffle: media event or substantive damage to Obama? Discuss.

Let me stipulate to one thing: if this were two Republicans squabbling, I’d be laughing my head off at the moment. And I can assure you a lot of them are.

The Clinton campaign has gotten so deep inside the Obama campaign’s collective head it just ain’t funny — or, depending on your political persuasion, it’s very funny.

Late Tuesday night I wrote that the upshot of the March 4th contests was that Clinton had beaten Obama up a bit and he hadn’t responded. She’d not only bloodied up his poll numbers a bit by throwing all sorts of stuff at him. She also showed that it wasn’t at all clear that Obama was enough of a fighter to stand up to this stuff or get back in her face. More than the delegate numbers, that was the challenge March 4th had left him with.

But since then she’s just been slapping this guy around like crazy. She’s on the offense every day, dictating the terms of the discussion and getting results.

This “monster” thing is a good case in point. That’s a pretty over-the-top thing for a key campaign advisor to say. But what it tells me more than that is that the Clinton campaign has these guys rattled really bad. Some of this is no doubt due to the fact that Power is a bit out of her element. She’s more from the academic/policy world than the political/policy world. But, again, rattled. The Clinton folks have been bashing Obama like crazy. Now they follow up by explicitly demanding that Obama fire one of his key foreign policy advisors and … how, long did it take? An hour? And she’s gone.

If boxing is our metaphor she’s got him cornered on the ropes on one side of the ring and she’s just landing punch after punch. And all he can manage are the defensive moves that her constant attacks dictate.

Just as I was writing, TPM Reader KM sent in this note …

Can’t believe that Samantha Power actually resigned. This is the type of phony “controversy” the GOP/Karl Rove uses to their advantage. Josh famously called it the “bitch slap” theory of politics, and Clinton is using the same playbook. Obama needed to send a signal that these types of fake outrages won’t play, but by her quick resigntation, the bitch slap is alive and well.

Depressing.

So true, so true.

Now, one thing we get at TPM is a really front seat view of each side’s immediate feelings and reactions to the campaign. The notes come in angry or plaintive or descriptive. And sometimes they’re hard to read since we’re on the receiving end of some of the emotional turmoil the intensity of the campaign churns up. So from that, I have a pretty good sense of where the Obama supporters are at at the moment. And a lot of the more intensely engaged of them are telling each other that what Power said is exactly right. And I can see why they’re mad at Hillary after a lot of what’s happened over the last couple weeks.

But you know what? Ice cream’s fattening and we all die too. Get over it. This is about getting inside Obama’s (the collective Obama, let’s say) head, psyching him out, forcing mistakes and then going right back on the attack all over again. Getting the Obama folks pissed and gritting their teeth and off their game is precisely the point.

The Obama folks can either withdraw to a world where the ‘new politics’ reigns or focus on the fact that here in the real world there are two ‘old politics’ practitioners standing between him and the presidency and he needs to decide how he’s going to deal with that fact.

As I’ve written before in different contexts, you can’t get distracted by the literalism of the moment. To understand how politicking works you need to look not at the often terribly silly discussion points of the unfolding debates. You need to look at the larger picture the engagement is telling people. And right now this one’s saying that Obama won’t fight back, that he’s easy to fluster, that he’s weak. And that’s precisely why Team Hillary is taking this tack.

Late Update: David Corn’s got some more choice thoughts on this whole matter. One key issue, as David explains, is that campaign aides routinely talk about opposing candidates in this way when they think they’re speaking off the record, which Power apparently did. It’s not clear from the outside whether The Scotsman just flat out burned Power or whether she wasn’t savvy enough in this world to understand the ground rules of the conversation.

TPM Reader IB responds …

The bigger question is how did we get here? Obama rolled the dice, thinking he could win Texas and keep Ohio close. Had he done that, the kitchen sink strategy would have been seen as a failure. He chose wrong, and Clinton is making him pay for it. To dovetail on your boxing analogy, I don’t think he gets out of the corner by punch back hard. I think he just needs to wait for her to punch herself out. In the past few days she’s made some horrible statements (CIC Threshold), and the didn’t come from staffers. they came out of her own mouth. She turned up the volume and won in OH and TX. There is nothing saying that strategy will work next Tuesday.

Could be. And there’s always a danger of overplaying your hand. But firing Powers was an awfully big tell in my book. And as they say in a different context, hope is not a plan.

Obama-supporting TPM Reader PT is less sanguine …

I agree with your long account of the Powers flap/Obama floundering.

And let me add a further observation: this is not a good way to raise money. First, lose your mo in a suite of big contests – what good did my last donation do, I ask myself? Then, tell the world that you raised $55 million last month – ok, so they have more than enough money now. Finally, let themselves get visibly kicked around in the press and by Clinton. Do they even intend to fight? Do they have any plan? Any determination? Any discipline? Is there anyone even responding to Clinton on this stuff? Does Obama think he can just go out there and answer another eight questions this afternoon? My wallet’s closed shut, for now.

I do agree Hillary is a monster – in a cartoonish way, I think it’s true. And Obama has turned into a wet noodle. Sad to have to say it about my guy.

But not TPM Reader BH …

This is good strategy for Obama, not a sign of weakness. What he is setting up is one more in a long list of examples about the difference between the kind of leadership he offers, and that coming from the Clinton camp: Hillary plays dirty right out of Karl Rove’s operating manual (see going after Obama on NAFTA-gate when it was her people that talked, thus her vulnerability), while he gets rid of people that stoop to her level. The contrast will be increasingly clear to voters.

Yet another take from TPM Reader TSJ …

He had to fire powers. His campaign is based on not being the same old politics. Calling Clinton a “Monster” would qualify and they would have hammered him incessantly over it had she not resigned. My guess is The Scotsman screwed her but oh well. The other point is he can’t fight back at Hillary in a similar way as she’s attacking him. Even on non-slights (The Snub, the writing at the Texas debate) the pundits kept talking about how he was “disrespecting” her. He goes after her too hard he becomes the Angry Black Man beating up on the Poor White Lady. That’s a no go. She wants him to get dirty (so she can say, “See he isn’t special. He’s just like me.) AND she wants to play the victim card (Oh he’s beating up on me *tears*). He’s responded well to her attacks but they don’t get as much play in the media as his attacks on her gets. His campaigning in Mississippi has been brilliant and my guess effective but it hasn’t garnered as much attention as Clinton’s barrage ’cause it’s not the story they want to tell.

I take the point about the standard Obama is trying to set. And in a vacuum, making an example of power might not be a mistake. But in the context of recent days it seems of a piece with the rest.

And now TPM Reader BOM gets in on the act …

To project on what TB wrote you, Sen. Clinton apparently just made the following comment on the Power resignation “I think Senator Obama did the right thing but I think it is important to look at what she and his other advisers say behind closed doors…”

Now, first of all that sounds very follow-me-Gary-Hart kind of comment as we all know her own campaign staffers probably say things that are just as bad behind closed doors.

But more importantly, isn’t there a point at which the media realizes how conspicuously they took the bait when Clinton complained about media coverage and there is some kind of backlash ? I have been thinking it should come at some point because I don’t think journalists like the widespread perception they were easily manipulated by a SNL sketch and this kind of comment makes me think she is on the verge of overplaying her hand by constantly attacking Obama for things that it is easy to prove she is doing herself (Rezko trial that are actual her donors, NAFTA-gate, the comment thing … and so on).

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So John McCain has now done a limited, partial rejection of John Hagee’s anti-Catholicism. “I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee’s, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics.” What about Hagee’s statement that God is going to use Muslim terrorists to create “bloodbaths” in our streets to punish us for our sinful policies toward Israel? Can he repudiate that too?

Pocketing the Power firing and back on the offensive again: Hillary says voters should be suspicious that Obama tells Americans one thing while his advisors tell “foreign governments and foreign press” something else.