Clinton camp fires back over column

By Mark Felsenthal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top Democratic rivals for president tore into each other on Saturday after a conservative columnist asserted front-runner Hillary Clinton claimed to have damaging information about Barack Obama.

The Clinton campaign denied the accusation, saying Obama's reaction to the vaguely worded column by Robert Novak played into Republican hands and showed the Illinois senator's lack of political savvy.

Obama's team later said they took the Clinton campaign at its word but bristled at the idea they fell for Republican tricks and should not have fought back against "smear politics" in the race for the presidency in the November 2008 election.

Clinton, a senator from New York and the wife of former President Bill Clinton, has been the target of frequent attacks by Obama and some of the other Democratic contenders for the White House over her ability to deliver straight answers.

Novak, a syndicated columnist, wrote: "Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it."

Novak did not specify the information or give more details about its source.

Obama, a first-term senator seeking to portray himself as an alternative to traditional Washington politics, seized on the article and said Clinton should either come forward with any information she has or repudiate Novak's column.

"She of all people, having complained so often about 'the politics of personal destruction,' should move quickly to either stand by or renounce these tactics," Obama said in his initial statement.

He called the column "a shameless item" aimed at smearing him through "innuendo and insinuation."

Clinton's camp quickly fired back.

"A Republican-leaning journalist runs a blind item designed to set Democrats against one another. Experienced Democrats see this for what it is. Others get distracted and thrown off their games," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said in a statement.

"We have no idea what Mr. Novak's item is about and reject it totally."

IOWA BATTLE LOOMS

The sharp exchange reflects the rising intensity of the campaign seven weeks before Iowa opens the state-by-state battle in each party to pick nominees to run for president.

Clinton leads Obama and former Sen. John Edwards in national polls. But in Iowa, the race is much closer.