Yes, but when can we start questioning his competence?

Last week, Obama's first major decision as a candidate for president - choosing people for a steering committee to help him pick a vice president - turned into an unmitigated disaster when it was revealed that his primary hire for the committee accepted sweetheart loans from a major sub-prime lender.

His subsequent explanation was lame, halting, and incredibly incoherent.

Well the candidate has stepped in it again. This time, by hiring Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle to serve on his general election staff. The move has Clintonites madder than wet hornets with one political insider quoted in the New York Observer as saying it was the biggest "F**k you" he's ever seen in politics.

A former bundler to Hillary Clinton just called in to tell me that Barack Obama's selection of Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff to the campaign's eventual vice presidential nominee is the "biggest f**k you I have ever seen in politics."

The donor, speaking on background, said that everyone in Clinton circles knows the two have hard feelings towards one another and haven't spoken since Clinton removed Solis Doyle as campaign manager, and that Clinton loyalists view her with deep suspicion and believe that she is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.

"Either one of two things happen," said the bundler. "Hillary is selected as vice president and they fire Patti, or Hillary is not going to be the vice president."

The bundler said that Clinton loyalists were livid over the pick.

"You don't hire Patti Solis Doyle for her operational expertise," said the bundler. "You don't do that. This is someone who failed dramatically at her job. You only bring her on to f**k someone else."