The “war room”, the hub of attack, counter-attack and spin which was at the heart of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns in the 1990s, has swung back into action with renewed force after Hillary Clinton was bloodied by her rivals for the first time in a debate last week.

With so few stumbles on the road to the presidential nomination, her war room has barely been needed until now but it has quietly been prepared for the moment when she trips up.

It was Hillary Clinton who invented the war room during her husband’s campaign and she has developed her own fighting machine. “Her operation is formidable,” said Jeff Gerth, co-author of Her Way, a well regarded Clinton biography. “Politics is not a polite sport and if you’re not prepared to rough it you’re going to get rolled over.”

Clinton has recruited rapid rebuttal experts to take on what she calls the “Republican attack machine”, but they are proving equally lethal against her Democratic rivals.

Their philosophy is similar to that of the mysterious unofficial website www.Hillaryis44.com – a reference to her would-be status as the 44th president – which warns darkly that one of the clearest threats to her election will come from “Democrats who repeat Republican propaganda to undermine Hillary”.

The pink website, which looks beguilingly amateurish while being deadly professional, solicits confidential tips on her rivals and is believed to be a “back door” into her war room.

Clinton’s team sprang into operation after last week’s Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia. She flip-flopped on the question of issuing drivers’ licences to illegal immigrants and was attacked by her opponents for being calculating, secretive and evasive on a range of issues, from tackling Iran to locking up records from her White House years.

At the spin room backstage, on television and the web, the Clinton camp – looking only momentarily rattled – spread the message that it was “six guys” piling on “one strong woman”.

Barack Obama, her closest rival in the polls, was pilloried for abandoning his promises about the “politics of hope”.

The next day Clinton received the endorsement of a leading public sector union and punched the air with a boxing glove to prove her fighting spirit.

Clinton’s counterblast was so powerful that some critics believe it amounted to overkill. She was “whiney”, “tinny”, playing the “victim”, a “diva”, they claimed. In one blow, Obama suggested that he was above playing the race card while she whinged about her gender.

Referring to attacks on him, Obama said: “I didn’t come out and say, ‘Look, I’m being hit on because I look different from the rest of the folks on the stage’.” However, the war room operates on the principle that no attack, no matter how small, will go unpunished. “They don’t call it the Clinton machine for nothing,” said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at Virginia University. “They take every gnat and smash it with a sledgehammer. It’s mean, but it works.”

One poll taken after last week’s debate showed Clinton extending her lead over Obama, which already averaged 45% to 22%. Her rivals are in a bind: every punch by Clinton proves her toughness, while every jab by them can be portrayed as a sign of their desperation to win.

The war room’s strategy has been carefully thought through.

Ron Fournier, a political commentator, noted that Clinton’s advisers had told him long ago that “there is a clear and long-planned strategy to fend off attacks by accusing her male rivals of gathering against her”.

Leading last week’s charge was Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, and his deputy Phil Singer, who was responsible for opposition research during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

Hillaryis44.com provides some intriguing hints about what may be to come. It includes a list of questions for Tim Russert, the moderator of last week’s debate and host of NBC’s Meet the Press, to ask Obama when he next appears on the show. They include such topics as Obama’s alleged ties to shady financiers and friends of the mob in Chicago and other supposed ethical and political lapses.

As Clinton herself has said, “When you are attacked, you have to deck your opponent.”

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