IN THE few weeks since Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president, a striking element of her campaign strategy has emerged: criticise her and her team will turn the big guns on you.

Dick Morris, a fierce opponent of Clinton who was her husband’s closest political guru for years, has described criticism of the couple as the “new mortal sin” in American politics.

“Nobody’s allowed to do it,” he observed last week. “Certainly none of their opponents. If they dare to, Hillary sends in one of her boys, who practically accuses them of being unAmerican.”

Chris Matthews, a television talk show host and former presidential speechwriter popular with Democrats, said: “Is this the strategy? You cannot dare criticise us?”

Robert Shrum, the top adviser to Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign and John Kerry in 2004, warned Team Clinton that “attack, attack, attack doesn’t always work, as the people in the Charge of the Light Brigade found out”.

Clinton’s spokesman had unleashed a ferocious assault on her main rival, Barack Obama, for failing to disown some stinging remarks by David Geffen, a film mogul who raised $1.3m (£650,000) for him in Hollywood last week.

Geffen tweaked some raw nerves in the Clinton camp by reeling off a list of concerns that are usually only whispered about the “royal” Clintons. He knocked Hillary for being ambitious, polarising and stubborn about the Iraq war, intimated that husband Bill was still a womaniser and suggested that they were both seasoned liars.

Clinton’s camp fought back by demanding that Obama apologise and return the $1.3m. Obama’s spokesman refused, suggesting that the Clintons had been only too eager to have Geffen’s money and reward him with sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House when it had suited them.

It was not the first time Clinton’s campaigners had retaliated in such a way. John Edwards, another rival for the Democratic nomination, was savaged by her advisers when he suggested last month that senators and congressmen should refuse to fund the surge of new troops in Iraq. “Silence is betrayal,” he claimed.

Edwards did not name names, but Team Clinton took his remarks personally. Howard Wolfson, who led the attack on Obama last week, railed against Edwards for failing to live up to his “bragging” in 2004 about running a positive campaign.

Fighting dirty while accusing your opponents of diving in the mud has been a hallmark of the Clintons for years, according to Shrum. It happened to Robert Dole, the Republican nominee in 1996, he recalled. “He was constantly accused by the Clinton campaign of being negative while it was relentlessly running a barrage of negative ads.”

Although Hillary Clinton claimed to be above the fray, she also laid into the “politics of personal destruction”, a phrase redolent of the Bill Clinton era. It left opponents scratching their heads: if they could not refer to her vote for the Iraq war, nor mention her husband’s impeachment or private life, was there any criticism they could voice?

Mike McCurry, a White House press secretary in the Bill Clinton era, believes the clash with Obama was “designed to test battle systems” for the 2008 campaign. “She wanted to signal, ‘I’m not going to get slapped around’,” he said. “It’s important for her to establish that because of the fear of Democrats that she will get Swift-boated” — a reference to the Republicans’ brutal demolition of Kerry’s status as a Vietnam veteran.

It was a surprise, however, to see Clinton’s attack dogs unleashed so soon against a Democrat, rather than a Republican. “It’s something people may have raised an eyebrow about,” McCurry acknowledged.

However, one of the Clintons’ most vitriolic opponents during their White House years has suspended hostilities.

There was no bigger hater of the Clintons in the 1990s than Richard Mellon Scaife, a billion-aire publisher known as the “funding father of the right”. He financed the Arkansas Project, which dug up every possible piece of dirt, real and imagined, against the couple. The campaign led, ultimately, to Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives. He was acquitted by the Senate.

Christopher Ruddy, who co-owns the right-wing online newspaper NewsMax, in which Scaife has a stake, announced: “Both of us have had a rethinking.” He went on to claim that Bill Clinton “wasn’t such a bad president”. Hillary, he added, had “moderated and developed a separate image”.

But Ruddy told The Sunday Times that the right had not finished with her yet. Hostility would increase if she became the Democratic nominee. “I believe she will become a big lightning rod when she gets the nomination, so why make a big issue of her now?” he said.

It was confirmation of one of Geffen’s stated fears — that the Republicans would only set about destroying her once she had seen off her rivals.

With almost 21 months left before the presidential election, the prize may go to the candidate with the most stamina for the fight. There were signs last week that Obama was already wearying. A leading commentator in Iowa noted that he seemed tired and off his game on a campaign visit last week.

“Aides allowed he had takena late-night flight back from the West Coast,” David Yepsen wrote. “He was flat and his answers meandered at times.”

McCurry said American presidential campaigns were gruel-ling and the question of Obama’s stamina was “the kind of thing people are waiting to learn about him”.

Obama seemed to regret that his aides got involved in a tit-for-tat slanging match with Clinton’s team. “We have to be careful not to slip into playing the game as it customarily is played,” he said.

If Clinton’s team cannot silence any of her opponents, it may well be able to pound them into exhaustion.

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