Hillary Clinton's former campaign communications director on Monday said if John Edwards had been honest about his affair or if the news were public before the Iowa caucuses in January, the New York senator could have been the next presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, not Barack Obama.

Howard Wolfson told FOX News on Monday that playing the what-if game doesn't change the outcome. Still, he said he would like to have had the information earlier about Edwards' affair with aspiring producer Rielle Hunter.

"My gut tells me that had Senator Edwards dropped out of the race or had this become public prior to Iowa that we would have done better in Iowa," said Wolfson, whose candidate placed a close third behind Edwards in the Jan. 3 caucuses. "At the end of the day you can play the what-if game endlessly, and you can play both ways you know. If Senator Clinton hadn't gotten teary eyed in New Hampshire I think Senator Obama would have won New Hampshire and he would have been the nominee in January. So there are a thousand different ways you can play the what-if game but I do believe that the result would have been different had this become public a year ago."

Edwards admitted last Friday that he had an affair with Hunter, who joined his campaign as a videographer in July 2006 and tracked the candidate until she was fired near the end of the year. Edwards gave the confessional interview about the romance after questions hit critical mass following a tabloid report in late July revealed that he had been at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to meet with Hunter and her child. Edwards denies he is the father of the child.

Wolfson's claims, however, that Clinton could be the likely nominee if Edwards had been scandalized are disputable. A Washington Post poll taken after the caucuses showed 43 percent of voters who backed Edwards would have chosen Obama as a second choice, not Clinton.

Clinton's campaign also suffered from serious in-fighting at the time, according to an Atlantic Monthly magazine article that Wolfson did not 100 percent discount.

"You had some people in the campaign who want to try to get their side of the story out there and have leaked a lot of polling memos and other data. ... It obviously reflects very badly on Hillary that people did that. I don't think that it's indicative of the kind of president she would have been," Wolfson said.

"Look there were tensions within the campaign, there were people who had disagreements about strategy and unfortunately what happens at the end of a losing campaign, especially one that was as high-profile as this, is that this all gets played out in the media and you have a lot of people with scores to settle or reputations to help preserve and they want to put their side of the story out there."

Wolfson declined to name names and acknowledged that Obama's campaign ran a better race. But he said Clinton's campaign should not be seen in retrospect as having fallen apart under its own weight.

"By and large the communications team got along well, people that we had out on the road with Senator Clinton worked well with the people we had back in the headquarters in Arlington," he said. "I don't think it's useful to point fingers. My attitude is that all of us in the senior leadership in the campaign bear at least some responsiblity for the outcome."