The New York Times reported today that “morale is low” amongst Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers, as the group attempts to rally an electoral comeback against frontrunner Barack Obama. With campaign insiders and political analysts alike calling March 4’s Texas and Ohio contests vital to the success of either campaign, the New York Times report paints a dreary look at the Clinton campaign’s optimism following a string of 11 consecutive primary defeats.

“After13 months of dawn-to-dark seven-day weeks,” the Times writes of the Clinton campaign, “the staff is exhausted. Some have taken to going home early - 9 p.m. - turning off their BlackBerrys, and polishing off bottles of wine, several senior staff members said.”

Such a picture isn’t exactly what the Clinton campaign has been trying to project, especially on the heels of several media fiascos regarding personnel changes within the campaign.

“Some advisers have been heard yelling at close friends and colleagues,” the Times reports. “In a much reported incident, Mr. Penn [chief pollster and strategist] and the campaign advertising chief, Mandy Grunwald, had a screaming match over strategy recently that prompted another senior aide, Guy Cecil, to leave the room. ‘I have work to do - you’re acting like kids,’ Mr. Cecil said, according to three people in the room.”

“Others have taken several days off, despite it being crunch time,” the newspaper reports. “Some have grown depressed, be it over Mr. Obama’s momentum, the attacks on the campaign’s management from outside critics or their view that the news media has been much rougher on Mrs. Clinton than on Mr. Obama.”

Supporting the New York Times’ account, there is a growing criticism within the world of Democratic elites that the Clinton campaign has been mismanaged, a belief that has recently led many of the party’s coveted superdelegates to either drop their public support of Clinton or realign themselves with Obama.

Brent Budowsky, former senior congressional staffer to Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Rep. Bill Alexander, is succinct in his evaluation of the situation. He assesses Senator Clinton’s tactics as a “$150 million fiasco of division, mismanagement and self-destruction.”

“Hillary Rodham Clinton is a good person, a good Senator and a good public servant who has many years left in a career that could well ultimately lead to the presidency,” Budowsky writes. But “she and her campaign have done some very bad things, in a very bad way. With very bad results.”

Budowsky, who believes Clinton should withdraw today, nevertheless thinks that “The most likely outcome is that on March 5, Hillary Clinton withdraws from the presidential campaign and endorses Barack Obama.”

Clinton does maintain a core of devoted believers, although as reported yesterday by The Huffington Post, the senator has begun writing thank-you cards to major donors, and has all but dropped the phrase “when I’m president” from her campaign speeches.

In a campaign appearance today, Clinton adopted a more negative strategy than ever before, ridiculing Obama’s message of hope and rhetorical skills with an over-the-top, sardonic imitation that included the line, “The sky will open, the light will come down…”

Noted columnist Frank Rich perhaps says it best, however, in today’s piece in the New York Times: “As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon all hope ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and - talk about bizarre - against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.”

“It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise - the priceless value of ‘experience’ - was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco,” writes Rich. “Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination - “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November - she was routed by an insurgency.”