US election: Infighting and battle for authority doomed Clinton presidential campaign, reveals biographer

A fuller reckoning of the extent of the infighting in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign began to emerge yesterday - just as Democrats were stepping up their efforts to unite around Barack Obama as the party's presidential candidate.

In the August edition of Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy, a Clinton biographer, describes a candidate who failed to set up clear lines of authority, opting instead for an organisation which was a "team of rivals".

The picture of discord emerges a day after Bill Clinton held his first extensive telephone conversation with Obama since his wife's defeat a month ago.

The discussion was seen as an important symbol of healing between the camps. The Obama campaign is anxious to win over Clinton's supporters - women, working-class white men, and Latinos - especially in the swing states, where she won the primaries, and to unite the party before the forthcoming contest against John McCain.

A Clinton insider said the former president was committed to helping Obama win the election against McCain. The source dismissed reports of rancour between the former president and Obama.

However, bitterness remained about the extent of the Obama campaign's efforts to help Clinton with her campaign debt. Clinton was also continuing to negotiate with Obama about the timing of her speaking slot at the Democratic convention.

Meanwhile, Patti Solis Doyle, who as Clinton's campaign manager was among the "team of rivals", started her first day of work at the Obama campaign yesterday.

Other Clinton aides have joined the Obama campaign in recent days, including her former policy adviser, Neera Tanden.

But Doyle is likely to remain the only member of the Big Five, as Sheehy describes it, to join the Obama campaign. She will be in charge of the vice-president's campaign, a move seen as a slap to Clinton, who had sacked Doyle earlier this year.

The rivalry between Doyle, strategists Mark Penn and Harold Ickes, and media specialists Mandy Grunwald and Howard Wolfson crippled the campaign, Sheehy writes. It faced further confusion over the role of Bill Clinton, who tried, but failed, to set up his own office within her headquarters in suburban Washington DC.

Some of the former president's advice was productive. It took Bill Clinton to convince his reluctant wife to put $5m of their own money into the campaign in March, a move that enabled her to keep running until the last primary