JOE GANDELMAN on the Hillary / Obama drug flap: “It negates all the imagery the campaign did early on to create a more likeable Hillary Clinton.” And that’s just the beginning of his complaints. Read the whole thing.

I think it demonstrates that Hillary isn’t good under pressure. Plus, campaigning like it’s 1992:

In the 1990s, the Clinton’s mastered the art of having surrogates say things about their enemies while claiming to be aloof from it. This was James Carville’s act for pretty much the entire second term. Sid Blumenthal was employed for similar purposes.

So when the Clinton team’s top man in New Hampshire attacks Barack Obama’s past drug use (couched in the “concern” that the GOP will make an issue of it if he wins the nomination) and then “disavows” the comments I find it hard to believe anyone is buying. For months we’ve been told how disciplined this campaign is and now that the polls aren’t going her way this happens by accident? Nah-ah.

It’s a very different political — and media — environment now. Have the Clintons kept up?

UPDATE: Blowback. “Believe me, the last thing Hillary Clinton wants is for anyone on her campaign or any other campaign to start looking into drug use. Especially for Candidates shacking up in Berkeley, just down from Telegraph Avenue, in the lovin’ summer of 1971.”