Monstrous errors

It’s been a week of collective foot-in-mouth for the once-dignified Team Obama.

Highlights have included the news – on the eve of the Ohio primary - that Austin Goolsbee, Obama's top economic policy adviser, had told Canadian officials that Obama’s public pledge to force a renegotiation of Nafta was not sincere, and was "more about political positioning." Cue Ohio, which has suffered huge manufacturing job losses, voting overwhelmingly for Clinton.

Then Obama’s foreign policy advisor, the usually eloquent and impressive Samantha Power (who seems to have never been able to escape a profile without being described as flame-haired), had a rather unsisterly outburst in an interview with The Scotsman:

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything,"

"You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'... The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

One of the much-touted qualities of Obama's brand was that it drew together a broad church. Now, though, with a pastor with alleged links to an 'Islamo-facism', an economic advisor who may well have cost him a swing state, and a diplomacy advisor who has been anything but diplomatic, it is all starting to come apart at the seams.

In the Scotsman interview, Power said: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.” She was, for the record, referring to the Clinton campaign.