For months during the heated contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mark J. Penn was the Hillary Clinton adviser everyone loved to hate.

The second guessing has begun in earnest.

The power couple that has all but run the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton won the 1992 California primary is finally ceding power - or in any case, being elbowed out of the way.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton replaced one pollster and a strategist with another Sunday, letting Mark Penn go and filling his place with Geoffrey Garin.

Mark J. Penn, one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s key and most controversial advisers, is leaving her campaign.

It may be too early for the post-mortems on the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY.

But given her troubles of late, the pre-mortems are rolling in.

There’s enough blame to go around, but Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, is taking a lot of the hits.

Patti Solis Doyle, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, is in the fight of her life.

Doyle, whose ties to Clinton go back to 1991, when she was hired as Clinton’s scheduler, has five days to turn the tide. After a solid defeat in Iowa, the New Hampshire primary is a crucial event for a candidate who was once considered a Democratic shoo-in.

This is Doyle’s first national campaign. Although she prefers to stay behind the scenes, she is known as a fiercely competitive person who runs a tight, well-organized operation. She has described herself as “tough as dirt.”

The Clinton campaign took a defensive crouch yesterday after reports that a company headed by one its top advisers had counseled Blackwater CEO Erik Prince.

A subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm headed by Clinton strategist Mark Penn, helped prepare Prince for his congressional testimony Tuesday.

However, Penn told Politico that he was not involved in the account, and said the firm’s work for Blackwater was “a temporary assignment based on a relationship that has concluded.”