Does the Clinton campaign want to keep the Obama drug flap story alive?

That's what New York Times reporter Kit Seelye asserted in The Times today, based on nothing more than the fact that Hillary pollster Mark Penn used the word "cocaine" on Hardball yesterday. And the question is being debated in political circles today, albeit no one will speak about it on the record.

Today, Hillary gave an interview to an Iowa radio station that sparked a new round of talk about this. Here's the key exchange:

QUESTION: Why are you the most electable?

CLINTON: People are asking -- number one, who would be the best president? Who is ready on day one. We are not going to have time to wait. Economy, wars, terror. There is no way to describe the pressures and stresses of this job.

The second important question is who can win – if you decide who is the best president, clearly we want to be able to win. I offer 35 years of experience and not just talking about change. You can’t demand change, you can’t hope for change, you have to work hard to create change and that is what I have done. If you want to know what I am going to do – look at what I have already done. I have been tested and vetted, there are no surprises.

Over at The Politico, Ben Smith interprets this as an effort on Hillary's part to draw "a contrast with unnamed rivals." The suggestion being that she is making an implicit reference to "surprises" that just might lurk in Obama's past.

It's true that Hillary was asked why she's the most electable, and that her answer to the question -- that there are "no surprises" in her past -- could be interpreted as wanting to keep the implicit comparison in the air. This is similar to the line from her New Hampshire chair that caused all the controversy -- i.e., that GOP rivals could start asking if there's more to Obama's drug past than we know -- which naturally gives rise to the suspicion that the Hillary campaign wants the drug talk to kind of hang out there.

Anyone who wants to believe this will also see nefarious doings behind the fact that Penn referred to Obama's "cocaine" use last night on Hardball. It's easy to see dark motives at play with Penn, obviously, because he's such an unpleasant figure and because he's become a kind of stand-in for everything that's wrong with the uglier side of Clintonian politics.

But Hillary's claim that she was vetted comes at the very end of a long answer that veered into a discussion of her own electability, and it seems equally likely that this could simply be a reference to just that -- her own electability. The Hillary campaign is getting killed on this story -- the Obama people have skillfully ridden it for all it's worth for days now, raising money off of it and using it to paint her as a dirty campaigner in the eyes of purist Iowa voters.

Indeed, it seems clear to me that the only thing the Hillary people want from this story right now is that it go away. Of course, suggestive answers like the above from Hillary make it easier for the press to hang on to the story. But it's hard to imagine that Camp Hillary wants this talked about any longer.

But I'd like to hear what you all have to say about this, and wanted to throw this one open to readers. Have at it.

Late Update: Steve Benen has a good post on the broader context here, and Michael Crowley has some color from the press conference that followed. They both seem to conclude, as did I, that Hillary's comments are worded in such a way that guarantees that this story keep going, but both also tilt more strongly in the direction of suggesting that the campaign's "no surprises" line is partly designed to keep the drug talk hanging in the air.

Late Late Update: Here's some video of the subsequent press conference:

Still Later Update: Obama weighs in.