Washington,Jan 13(ANI):The Clinton political machine, it seems, is heading towards a sputtering end, as a new book has now come out with a highly critical but un-sourced portrait of Hillary Clinton to which there has been no firm response.

According to Politico, what’s notable about the highly publicized release of “Game Change,” is the virtual silence from the Clinton camp.

The lack of public outrage seems to mark the sputtering end of what was once the Clinton political machine. One time Clinton loyalists have acknowledged this development.

There has been no campaign of veteran Clintonites spinning the press corps and trying to pre-emptively discredit the book’s scathing depiction of Hillary Clinton as a rudderless candidate and a cheerleader for vicious tactics against eventual winner Barack Obama.

There is no team of Clinton proxies going on cable television to denounce authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann as scurrilous and unworthy of belief.

The book’s primary sources about the former candidate and current secretary of state are her own former staffers and intimates.

This time, it seems, Bill and Hillary Clinton are virtually alone.

While the low-key response to a brutal portrayal of Clinton in part reflected a decision to keep a prominent face of the Obama administration’s foreign policy above the fray, it was also a recognition of reality.

The same senior aides who had leaked damaging gossip could hardly be expected to rebut it.

These people have violated the Clinton world’s final taboo: After savaging one another in the press for more than a year, the former aides finally turned on the principals.

“Game Change” peels back a decade of careful renovations off Hillary Clinton’s carefully constructed public face, casting her in the terms that defined her at her lows in the mid-1990s: scheming, profane, sometimes paranoid, often tone-deaf.

The authors report that Clinton and her aides plotted behind allies’ backs to enter the 2004 presidential contest and that Clinton herself favored some of the nastiest tactics, such as suggesting that then-Sen. Barack Obama had been a drug dealer, in the 2008 campaign.

And she continued to believe - without evidence, and long after her concession - that he had, in effect, stolen the Iowa caucuses by importing out-of-state voters.

Her husband, the former president, is depicted as canny, but flawed as ever: making key errors, as has been widely reported, in South Carolina, and raising his own aides’ suspicions that he was reprising the extra-marital wanderings that exploded during his presidency.

The result leaves the Clintons exposed and isolated, their darkest suspicions - “us against the world” - validated.

The book reported that many of Clinton’s Senate colleagues - including some who nominally supported her, such as New York Sen. Chuck Schumer - were secretly offering aid to Obama all along.

And the judgment from Halperin - the high priest of establishment political journalism, who cut his teeth as a political reporter covering Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign - marks the end of a particular era.

Clinton can, of course, survive the judgment. She has one of the world’s best jobs, and one with an unparalleled capacity to change the subject from uncomfortable political stories, as well as to get out of town: She has conveniently scheduled a trip for this week to Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said he hadn’t read the book and declined to comment, and a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton also declined to comment on the book. (ANI)