A worried Democratic Party official has begun to describe Hillary Clinton’s strategy for winning the presidential nomination as the “Tonya Harding option”.

The anonymous quote, which echoed across the internet yesterday, is a reference to the American Olympic ice skater who was complicit 14 years ago in a hitman’s assault on the knees of Nancy Kerrigan, her chief rival for the gold medal.

In this scenario, the role of the saccharine-sweet Kerrigan is being filled by Barack Obama. He returned from his Caribbean holiday yesterday to find aides complaining that Mrs Clinton had begun another effort to “take his legs out”.

They screamed foul over her comment that she, unlike Mr Obama, would have left the Rev Jeremiah Wright’s church in protest at sermons urging his congregation to sing “God damn America!” or suggesting that the US Government had invented Aids to destroy “people of colour”.

Mr Obama said yesterday that critics were making a meal of “five or six of his most offensive statements” and warned he would not be able to solve America’s problems if people continued to get so excited every time “someone says something stupid”.

His aides have described Mrs Clinton’s remarks as a “transparent effort to distract attention” away from her own embarrassment at being caught exaggerating the risks she faced in Bosnia 12 years ago.

The Clinton campaign spent much of yesterday claiming innocence, saying she had expressed an “honest view shared by many Americans” by declaring Mr Wright would not have been her pastor.

It added that Mr Obama’s aides had responded with “disingenuous” attacks because he did not want an examination of “the shortcomings in his record and the efforts he has made to embellish it.” Back came the Obama campaign, saying that Mrs Clinton’s “fantastic invention of a sniper-raked landing is one in a growing list of instances in which she has exaggerated her role as First Lady”.

Trading insults is largely how the two Democratic campaigns spend their time these days. The fear, however, among party elders is that they are doing the work for John McCain, the Republican nominee-elect, in driving up each other’s negatives.

Despite the mathematical improbability of Mrs Clinton securing enough delegates to win the nomination, she has signalled a determination to battle on through the next three months and suggested yesterday that even elected delegates could yet “exercise independent judgment” by backing her at the convention.

Bill Clinton said yesterday his family is “not big on quitting”, adding: “If a politician doesn’t wanna get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.”

Mr McCain, meanwhile, delivered a heavyweight foreign policy speech yesterday that showed him tracking back towards the political centre and away from his sometimes hawkish reputation. “I detest war — it is wretched beyond all description,” he said, urging greater co-operation between America and its international allies.

It was left to other obsevers to point out that in the 1994 Winter Olympics, Harding finished eighth, while Kerrigan came second.

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