Acting at the behest of Bill and Hillary Clinton, a senior campaign aide to Gen. Wesley Clark has carried out the "political assassination" of Democratic presidential front-runner Howard Dean, former top Clinton advisor Dick Morris contended late Friday.
"I believe we have witnessed a political assassination of Howard Dean by the Clintons," Morris told Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" - hours after polls showed that Dean's once formidable lead in Iowa had evaporated.
Morris named Clark communications director Chris Lehane, a former Gore campaign spokesman who cut his teeth as a key operative in the Clinton White House's attack machine.
"Chris Lehane has been the source of a lot of these negative stories [about Dean]," he explained. "He's a vehicle for Clinton feeds."
Morris said that other candidates don't have the resources for the kind of opposition research that Lehane has been carrying out for Gen. Clark, whose campaign is staffed wall-to-wall with Clinton White House veterans.
"The places that have the money for negative research are the Democratic National Committee and the Clintons," said Morris.
On Friday the New York Times detailed Lehane's role in the current campaign, calling him "such a shrewd practitioner of what one admiring strategist called 'the political black arts' that lately, when a negative story appears, rivals point to him."
The Times referred to Lehane as Gen. Clark's "secret weapon" in his campaign's war against Dean and other rivals.
In 2000, it was then-Gore aide Lehane who took an innocuous Republican campaign ad that flashed the word "De-moc-rats" across the screen and turned it into a major scandal.
After Lehane told reporters that the word "rats" was an attempt to use subliminal advertising to smear his party, the story turned up on the front page of the Times and dominated the news cycle for days.
"Chris understands the essential dynamic of politics, which is punch or be punched," Jim Jordan, Sen. John Kerry's former campaign manager, told the paper.
But some say Lehane's tactics against Howard Dean go further than that.
"Like criminals, most good political operatives have certain M.O.'s," one unidentified Lehane "friend" told the Times. "He's very aggressive and he's very thorough and very good at getting reporters what they need to do a hatchet job on your opponent."
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