At the end of today's Obama conference call, Gibbs responded to a question from a Latino reporter who asked what surrogates the campaign might roll out in its effort to court the Latino community's voters. Gibbs said, "We will fold in surrogates that have been helpful to the Clinton campaign."

I asked him if Clinton's former campaign manager, Solis Doyle, would be one of those surrogates.

"I believe she will be," said Gibbs. "We have obviously hired her to do a very specific job to be the chief of staff to the eventual vice-presidential nominee and I think that's the job that we hired her to do and we expect her to do and we expect that to take up most of her time."

The donor, speaking on background, said that everyone in Clinton circles knows the two have hard feelings towards one another and haven't spoken since Clinton removed Solis Doyle as campaign manager, and that Clinton loyalists view her with deep suspicion and believe that she is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.

"Either one of two things happen," said the bundler. "Hillary is selected as vice president and they fire Patti, or Hillary is not going to be the vice president."

The bundler said that Clinton loyalists were livid over the pick.

"You don't hire Patti Solis Doyle for her operational expertise," said the bundler. "You don't do that. This is someone who failed dramatically at her job. You only bring her on to fuck someone else."

UPDATE: Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee e-mails with a different take: “Patti will be an asset and good addition to the Obama campaign. After nearly two decades in political life, she brings with her the ability to tap an extensive network that will be a huge asset to Senator Obama. As Senator Clinton has said, we’re all going to do our part to help elect Senator Obama as the next President of the United States.”

Which, given the fact that she was demoted mid-campaign by Hillary Clinton, who she reportedly hasn't spoken to since, doesn't say much for Barack Obama's intentions of picking the former first lady as his running mate.

UPDATE: A Clinton bundler is not pleased.

Here's the announcement, which lists appointments to a number of other key general-election campaign posts:

"I've been sensing an undercurrent in New York and then the Ferraro thing just set it off for me," said Blitz, referring to remarks Geraldine Ferraro made in Monday's New York Times. (She called Obama "sexist" and suggested that she might not vote for him.) "There is not a great deal of enthusiasm for Barack Obama and some are considering voting for McCain, others are saying let's wait and see, we don't know him yet."

One of the issues, said Blitz, is that some women feel there aren't enough women in the leadership of the campaign. Blitz said that just about everyday she receives email messages sent out by Clinton aides Ann Lewis and Maggie Williams (she made personal donations to the Clinton campaign early on). From the Obama campaign, she said, all the updates come from men.

Blitz said she found it heartening that Clinton's former campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, reportedly held informal talk with Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod.

"It's a good thing," she said. "We need senior women operatives to migrate from the Clinton campaign to the Obama campaign."

The Clinton campaign puts a good deal of Clinton's disastrous post- February 5 showing on Solis Doyle.

“It’s very important in politics not to make the same mistake too many times,” Penn said at the time.

As if proving those words, Penn was removed by the Clinton campaign as chief strategist, after it was revealed that he had met with officials from Colombia to push a bilateral trade treaty with the United States, a policy Hillary Clinton opposes. It wasn’t the first time Penn’s corporate work posed an apparent conflict of interest for the campaign, but this time it cost him his title, if not his association with the campaign. (He will continue to poll and advise, according to an official campaign statement.)

Now, it will be none other than Wolfson, the communications director he gently criticized in public and butted heads with in private, who will take over his primary responsibilities as the campaign’s chief message crafter.

Until now Penn had successfully dodged a barrage of bullets from Clinton campaign advisers disgruntled with his choice of tactics, his unwavering belief in the power of poll-tested messages and his chilly personality. Dating back to at least Clinton’s loss in Iowa, staffers have been privately wishing him the worst.

And yet Penn’s closeness to Bill Clinton (his Burson-Marsteller office is decorated with several framed notes of “To Mark Penn, Thanks,” from President Clinton, including one across a Washington Post with the headline reading “Clinton Acquitted”) and the confidence the candidate ultimately had in him allowed him to hold onto the title of chief strategist, one he cherished and was proud of, even as his few allies argued that his influence in the struggling campaign had waned.

It took Penn’s own doing finally to knock him out of his position at the strategic helm. It was a seemingly unthinkable blunder, putting Clinton’s main message-maker at clear odds with one of her key economic messages as she appeals to working class voters in Pennsylvania. Worse still, it came after the Clinton campaign had tirelessly attacked the Obama campaign in the run-up to the Ohio primary after a lower-level adviser apparently suggested to Canadian officials that Obama’s position on Nafta was different from what he said on the campaign trail.

And it wasn’t the first time Penn found himself facing criticism for apparent conflicts of interest between his role as a high-paid public relations man and the (high-paid) brains of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Burson-Marsteller’s work for companies seeking to thwart union organizing campaigns enraged the union activists whose support the Clinton campaign was seeking. The firm’s contract with Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, led to some uncomfortable press for a candidate who constantly rails against foreclosures and the housing crisis. And its indirect representation of the military contractor Blackwater Worldwide, whose alleged above-the-law style of operation in Iraq have made it a prime example for war critics of the Bush administration’s mishandling of the occupation, raised yet more questions about Penn’s judgment.

What infuriated Penn’s colleagues in the Clinton campaign even more was the $13 million he received from the cash-strapped Clinton campaign, even as he kept receiving his Burson-Marsteller salary.

In the February interview with The Observer, he sought to defend his level of remuneration.

“I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and mis-reporting on this,” Penn said. “This has been overwhelmingly for voter contact and direct mail, and all of it goes to companies, not to me personally, and I do not own the companies, and they are part of a Fortune 500 company. Large teams of people are involved.”

He said that more than 70 percent of the expenditures had been for direct mail, printing and postage.

But news of the Colombia meeting brought the complaints of Penn’s critics to a head.

On April 7, the campaign decided that it could not ignore this last misstep, which directly undermined Clinton’s professed support for trade deals more favorable to American workers.

“After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as Chief Strategist of the Clinton Campaign,” Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams said in a statement. “Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign. Geoff Garin and Howard Wolfson will coordinate the campaign's strategic message team going forward.”

It is not yet clear exactly what Penn’s departure from the message team will mean for Clinton, and it could very well be too late for any of the major adjustments Wolfson has for years advocated for from within Hillaryland: that Clinton show more of her personal side and move away from the robotic predictability produced by an overreliance on Penn’s polling data.

In February, a source in the campaign, speaking on background, said that Mr. Penn’s philosophy was perfectly represented by a comment he made during one of Mrs. Clinton’s debate preps at campaign headquarters in early winter. About 15 staffers were in a room with Mrs. Clinton discussing how she could best respond to a particular line of attack. One of the aides, the source recalled, had an idea.

“I think you need to show a little bit of humanity,” said the aide.

Mr. Penn interjected. “Oh, come on, being human is overrated.”

“Everyone laughed and it broke the tension, and even he had a smile on his face,” said the source. “But it said a lot because it seemed to really encapsulate a viewpoint.”

Mr. Penn, in an interview that month, recalled the comment as self-deprecating, and was unrepentant about the campaign he had run. He asserted that to the extent that his message was heeded, it was successful. And even Penn’s enemies inside the campaign -- and they were legion -- allowed that his early work establishing Clinton as an experienced, tough-as-nails candidate had built the only foundation upon which a woman could plausibly be elected as commander in chief.

Penn often found himself shifting blame in the last few months, as his candidate lagged behind Obama in delegates and contests won.

He blamed the political ground and money game, run by former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, her deputy Mike Henry and longtime Clinton loyalist and his longtime foe Harold Ickes. What ruined it for Mrs. Clinton, he said in February, were “organization-driven” states, where she suffered defeats in “a series of caucuses that generated tremendous momentum for Obama.”

He had always done his job, he argued.

“I think that virtually every schoolchild knows that she is ‘ready on day one,’ Penn said at the time, referring to one of the slogans he designed for Mrs. Clinton. “If you look back—at the beginning she was ‘ready for change and ready to lead’ and that’s something that built a large coalition that carried her through Super Tuesday. Between then and now, there was a period where the campaign didn’t have resources to play ahead in those states it needed to campaign in.”

UPDATE: Demoted but very much not gone.

In an interview with The Observer, Mr. Panetta compared Mrs. Clinton’s top strategist, Mark Penn, to Karl Rove, suggested that the Clinton campaign had totally underestimated Barack Obama’s appeal, and complained about the overall lack of planning that he said had characterized the former First Lady’s bid to return to the White House.

Mr. Panetta, who served as chief of staff in the White House from July 1994 to January 1997, and who has contributed $2000 to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, complained that Mr. Penn “is a political pollster from the past.”

”I never considered him someone who would run a national campaign for the presidency,” he said.

He asserted that Mr. Penn “comes from an old school, like Karl Rove—it’s all about dividing people into smaller groups rather than taking the broader approach that was needed.”

Referring to Barack Obama, he said, “I think he really captured early on this deep feeling in the country about needing change in Washington. And people have underestimated how deep that sense was, just how much people felt the need for change.”

Mr. Panetta added that “for the money they brought in” the Clinton campaign “should have done a much better job.”

On the now-deposed campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, Mr. Panetta said, “Solis was someone who was obviously close to the [former] First Lady and had good relations with her, but again she didn’t have the experience that you need.”

Mr. Panetta served for 16 years in Congress prior to taking up his Clinton White House position and is now a director of the Panetta Institute, a nonpartisan center for the study of public policy at California State University.

Aside from his criticisms of specific people at the top of Mrs. Clinton’s team, he also asserted that the campaign in general had neither created an efficient ground operation nor shown tactical wisdom in its deployment of available resources.

“It seems to me like they rolled the dice on Super Tuesday, thinking that would end it,” he said. “And when it didn’t end it, they didn’t have a plan. And when it came to the caucus states, they did have a plan—which was to ignore them. I think those were serious mistakes.”

Mr. Panetta’s former boss, the 42nd president, has faced criticism in some quarters for the role he has played in his wife’s campaign. In particular, questions have arisen as to whether his irascibility has proved a damaging distraction.

Last month, Mr. Clinton derided Mr. Obama’s claim to have consistently opposed the Iraq war as a “fairy tale,” blew up at a reporter who asked him about a court case relating to the Nevada caucuses, and invoked Jesse Jackson’s successes in South Carolina two decades ago in what many observers—including some of Mrs. Clinton’s African-American supporters—saw as an attempt to marginalize Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

Though Mr. Panetta spoke cautiously about Mr. Clinton, he suggested that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers might have acted more prudently to neutralize the former president’s uneven temperament.

“I know from talking to him that he really does want to try to help her win,” Mr. Panetta said. “That’s what he has been trying to do. But he tends, like all of us, to sometimes have quick reactions to things.

“In the White House, if there was something important coming up, we would prepare him and engage him about what questions he might expect. And sometimes,” Mr. Panetta added with a rueful laugh, “that would let him get things out of his system while he was just with us.”

As for Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Panetta suggested that her apparent failure to connect with the public had been, at least in part, a consequence of the settings in which she had been placed by her campaign advisors.

“On television, they could have made her someone who came across as more genuine,” he said. “She comes across more that way when she talks to smaller groups, but they didn’t do that in an effective way.”

Asked about Mrs. Clinton’s closing statement at the Feb. 21 CNN debate in Austin, Texas, where she spoke of being “absolutely honored” to be sharing the stage with Mr. Obama and expressed concern for the nation’s future, Mr. Panetta said, “I think that was her strongest moment, and I would have recommended taking that kind of approach a long time ago. I think that idea of talking about the country and showing some emotion is much more effective.”

By contrast, Mr. Panetta was unimpressed by the former First Lady’s sharpest attack on Mr. Obama, in which she accused him of plagiarism and, in a mocking reference to his campaign slogan, asserted, “That’s change you can Xerox.”

“There should be much less of those kinds of moments,” he said.

In recent days, much speculation has centered on whether Mrs. Clinton’s campaigns is on its last legs. Mr. Panetta, for his part, suggested she could still win the nomination. His words, though, seemed suffused more with hope than with expectation.

“I think everybody felt she was in a very strong position” at the outset of the campaign, he said. “Obviously she is now someone who is the underdog. Everybody is still hoping that she might run the table, but it is a much tougher mountain to climb.”

When reached by cell phone Monday night in Albany, State Senator Ruben Diaz, Sr. said, "I never supported anyone yet, so, you know, if I support Obama? Yes. I am with Obama, yes."

Diaz, who has had a history of criticizing his fellow Democrats in New York, said, "Hillary's campaign has been going down because of Bill Clinton, William Jefferson Clinton. Because people like Charlie Rangel, who called Obama stupid."

But the final straw, Diaz, said, was the removal of Patti Solis Doyle as Clinton's campaign manager, which was announced over the weekend. The next day, Diaz, along with Assemblyman Jose Peralta, sent a letter to Clinton's campaign saying they felt the Hispanic community was being ignored, and Doyle treated as a scapegoat.

"It is hard to understand how the Hispanic community that has been there to keep your campaign alive could remain in your corner when the first Hispanic woman to serve as your presidential campaign manager has 'resigned' from her post," Diaz and Peralta wrote.

They went on to say, "Although we are inclined to believe that Patti Solis Doyle did resign, we would like you to realize that it will be very troubling to many if somehow we later find that she left her post under pressure because of the recent primary losses your campaign suffered. If so, we will have many questions about why a Hispanic woman who has helped to build Latino support for you throughout the nation would have been the one to take the blame and resign from her post instead of others involved with your campaign, including former President Clinton, who have caused serious problems and embarrassing situations for your campaign."

In the phone interview, Diaz told me, "This is the first Hispanic woman ever to run a presidential campaign. By replacing her, the message they are sending is that they are losing because of a campaign manger. So, at the end, what they are going to do is ruin this lady's career."

Peralta told me, "This is not a hostile letter. This is just trying to make sure that Hillary Clinton does not forget Latinos because she is going to bank on Latinos to win the election in Texas, she is going to bank on Latinos to win the election in Ohio and Pennsylvania."

When told of Diaz's decision to support Obama, Peralta said, "He said he was? Oh, the Reverend is always controversial in that way," and added, "Latinos still like Hillary. They're just concerned they may have been taken for granted."

Peralta said he was representing constituents who "wanted to make sure that there wasn't that distancing of Hillary Clinton from them in trying to court, not only a courting of another ethnic group, but forgetting about another ethnic group, being the Latinos."

When reached for a comment, a spokesman for Clinton's campaign referred to Doyle's comments in the AP, where she said, "This is my decision, my choice, my timing," and "I was really, really proud to be the first Hispanic woman to run a presidential campaign and particularly proud of the way Hispanics turned out and they turned out for Hillary."

Clinton's own statement reads:

In her opening remarks, Solis Doyle told reporters that when the D.N.C. penalized the Florida Democratic Party by stripping them of delegates to the national convention—because they defied the national party by moving up the date of the primary—“they thought Floridians wouldn’t vote, but we can see they’re voting in record numbers.” The campaign speculates that a major turnout is an expression of not only enthusiasm and a media-saturated primary campaign, but also, “the signal that they’re sending is that they fully expect to be heard,” as Penn said.

The three representatives of the campaign managed in the course of the call not only to heap praise on Floridians (“Hey, I think it is a testament to the people of Florida,” said Wolfson), but also to position themselves the voice of the people and the defenders of democracy. “We think that a million people coming out to vote in this country matters,” said Wolfson.

When asked why the campaign wanted delegates seated when there has been no real primary campaign in Florida, Penn said, “people in Florida have gotten a very significant campaign through the national media,” and added that he doubts there is “a household in Florida that doesn’t know about Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barrack Obama.” Penn also explained Hillary Clinton’s planned presence in Florida tonight by saying, “She is going to thank voters who came out and voted for her.”

Michigan, of course, is trickier to justify, given that her two main opponents weren’t even on the ballot. The campaign only noted this when asked about the convenient timing of coming out for Floridian voters after a big loss in South Carolina (and when she’s running comfortably ahead in Florida polls). “In fairness about Michigan,” said Penn, “the other candidates had taken their names off the ballot. Here everybody’s on the ballot, everyone had a level playing field in terms of campaigning, other than Senator Obama’s television ad.” He added later, “I think the situation was less clear then as to how many people would vote.”