Blumenthal not alone in distributing what's new and nasty: "the depths some folks go"

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: Top of the Ticket
Inside the beast

Peter Dreier over at the Huffington Post's "Off The Bus" site has an interesting piece that outs longtime Clintonite Sidney Blumenthal as a disseminator of anti-Obama email, some of it drawn from the "vast right wing conspiracy" that Blumenthal helped define.

What's interesting here isn't that Blumenthal is distributing this stuff -- political reporters, including us (L.A. Times) Ticketers, get this kind of email all the time from partisans. But it's useful for close watchers of politics -- i.e., Ticket readers -- to digest Dreier's piece as a look inside how some of the candidates' supporters operate. While the piece is specifically about Blumenthal, he is not alone in making sure that journalists and bloggers see whatever is new and nasty about the candidates the activists oppose. Sometimes the campaigns themselves send out the emails.

It's all part of the game, one that many political reporters take as part of the process as we try to figure out where the spin ends and the truth begins. But Dreier's piece also helps illuminates the depths some folks go to influence coverage and perceptions. Email, in a lot of ways, is the new whisper campaign.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/05/inside-the-beas.html

Link to Huffington Post, Sidney Blumenthal Uses Former Right-Wing Foes To Attack Obama:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/sidney-blumenthal-uses-fo_b_99695.html

[Aloha Spirit]

1. I like it... email is the new whisper campaign.

[Kolesar]

2. Syd Vicious and the William Ayers story

EXCERPT:

Some Clinton supporters who also knew about Ayers have been discreetly trying to catapult the story out of the right-wing sandbox into the wider mainstream media. On April 9, Fox News' Sean Hannity interviewed fellow right-winger Karl Rove, who raised the Ayers-Obama connection. The next day, ABC News reporter Jake Tapper wrote about Ayers in his Political Punch blog. The following week, on his radio show, Hannity suggested to his guest, George Stephanopoulos, that he ask Obama about his relationship with Ayers at the upcoming Philadelphia presidential debate. Stephanopoulos, who was Bill Clinton's press secretary, replied, "Well, I'm taking notes." The following night during the April 16 nationally televised Presidential debate, Stephanopoulos dutifully asked Obama about Ayers, who is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

One can only speculate how much influence Blumenthal did or did not have in elevating the Ayers story into the mainstream media and into the national political debate. What is certain is that Blumenthal sought to keep this classic red-baiting controversy alive.

Blumenthal's April 24 email dispatch featured a two-year old article by Sol Stern, published in City Journal, sponsored by the right-wing Manhattan Institute. The article, from the journal's Summer 2006 issue, doesn't mention Obama. Why would Blumenthal resurrect it now? The article, entitled "The Ed Schools' Latest--and Worst--Humbug," was, instead, a frontal attack on Ayers' views on educational theory and policy. Blumenthal obviously wasn't trying to offer enlightenment on educational policy or Obama's positions on school reform as much as he was presumably trying to keep Ayers' name, and his controversial past, in the public eye.

As a follow-up punch, Blumenthal again dipped directly into the "vast right wing conspiracy" by retrieving and circulating an article from the current issue of National Review -- the staunchly conservative opinion journal founded by William F. Buckley. The piece, titled "The Obama Way," was penned by Fred Siegel who, like Sol Stern, is a former 60s leftist who has moved to the opposite end of the political spectrum, serving at one point as a political advisor to Rudy Giuliani. Siegel's piece links Obama to corrupt Chicago machine politics, observing that "Blacks adapted to both the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics" of Chicago's Democratic Party. In the process, he manages to throw in as many spurious ad hominem attacks on Obama as he can, calling him a "friend of race-baiters" and a "man who would lead our efforts against terrorism yet was friendly with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant 1960s terrorist."

[WilliamPitt]

3. *sigh*

[EFerrari]

4. Aim low, Scott.