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Clinton Denies White House Run is in Trouble

Hillary Clinton on Friday denied her White House campaign was in disarray, despite sliding poll ratings and an uproar sparked by an aide who questioned her rival Barack Obama's drug history.

"If I had listened to ... the Washington chattering class, I would not be standing here would I?" Clinton told reporters, as controversy and reports of campaign turmoil swirled around her 2008 presidential bid.

"I believe in trusting my own instincts. I feel very, very good about the case that I am making."

New signs of fragility for the former first lady came just 20 days before Iowa holds first state votes for a Democratic nomination that Clinton seemed to have in her grasp just a few months ago.

She has endured six weeks of woe, battered by a shaky debate performance in Philadelphia, accusations that her campaign was planting questions at her events and the Obama drugs slur.

In a determined press conference, Clinton promised a "mad dash" towards the caucuses, starting this weekend with a five-day chopper tour or "Hilo-copter" blitz through all the midwestern's state's 99 counties.

A day after personally saying sorry to Obama over the remarks by powerful New Hampshire aide Bill Shaheen, Clinton pointedly did not take several chances to say that Obama's drugs past had no bearings on his White House prospects.

Shaheen quit the campaign on Thursday, after he told the Washington Post Republicans would attack Obama for dabbling in drugs as a teenager, which the Illinois senator had put down to youthful rebellion in a memoir.

"It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" Shaheen said.

Obama's campaign has accused Clinton's camp of turning to such personal attacks out of desperation, after he wiped out her poll leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, which holds its primary contest on January 8.

 The latest New Hampshire poll by the Concord Monitor newspaper showed Obama up by one percentage point, with 32 percent support, after having trailed her for months.

In Iowa, the race is a statistical dead heat, though several recent polls have given Obama a slim lead.

Clinton brushed off questions about the tightening race, and said she had never bought the narrative that she was an "inevitable" nominee.

"I always said this would get close. That's what happens in a contested election," she said in an interview to be broadcast later on Iowa Public Television.

She also rejected reports that former president Bill Clinton was growing anxious about her prospects, and was plotting a campaign shake-up.

"I don't know what you are talking about with these concerns. I really don't," she told a reporter.

"We are just going to go out every day and work hard. That is the only way I know how to run my campaign."

 Clinton suggested she was a safer bet for Democrats than a candidate who may have controversy lurking in their past, but later denied she had been referring to Obama.

"I have been tested. I have been vetted. There are no surprises," she said in the television interview, arguing that after 16 years in the heat of political combat she was best placed to take on the eventual Republican nominee.

"Whoever we nominate is going to be subjected to the full force of the Republican attack machine."

After months portrayed as likely Democratic nominee, Clinton must now try to turn around stories that see her as increasingly vulnerable, as she tries to hold off Obama, and third placed hopeful John Edwards in Iowa.

Clinton's hometown newspaper the New York Daily news offered a damning assessment of her position on Friday.

"Hillary Clinton entered yesterday's Democratic debate in a tight battle for first place. She left in danger of finishing third in the Iowa caucuses. Yikes."

"Clinton could lose the nomination she seemed to have locked up two months ago."