Throughout the 1990s, Sidney Blumenthal was an effective and articulate advocate, defending the Clintons from scurrilous attacks launched by right-wing pseudo-journalists. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Blumenthal has apparently decided that those right-wing pseudo-journalists’ smears deserve to be taken seriously after all.
Yesterday, Peter Dreier, a professor at Occidental college, broke what appears to have been an informal embargo, writing a piece for the Huffington Post on outrageous anti-Obama emails Blumenthal has been sending to a group of media allies for months.
Former journalist Sidney Blumenthal has been widely credited with coining the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” used by Hillary Clinton in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House where he worked as a high-level aide. A decade later, and now acting as a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton, Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he’s not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.
Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren’t being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers — including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers — in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists.
Dreier, who apparently did not receive Blumenthal’s emails first-hand, added that some of the pieces Blumenthal sends are substantive items from mainstream outlets, but “a staggering number of the anti-Obama attacks he circulates derive from highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources such as the misnamed Accuracy in Media (AIM), The Weekly Standard, City Journal, The American Conservative, and The National Review.”
This has caused something of a stir on Democratic and media circles, so it’s worth considering just how controversial these emails really are.
To be sure, Blumenthal apparently was dishing some pretty scurrilous dirt from vile right-wing hatchetmen. Presumably, he knows better — these are, after all, some of the same Republican attack dogs Blumenthal fought against for years.
Indeed, I’ve been trying to imagine if the shoe were on the other foot here. If a prominent Obama aide spent months distributing ugly anti-Clinton smears, written by notorious right-wing hatchetmen, to key media figures, there’d be considerable disgust in Democratic circles, and rightly so. Blumenthal himself would be quick to remind as many Dems as possible that we should be trying to knock right-wing smears down, not disseminating them to friendly journalists.
Except, as far as I know, Obama aides aren’t dishing right-wing dirt; Blumenthal is. That’s disappointing. What’s worse, Dreier’s piece indicated that this has been going on for six months, suggesting the emails weren’t just a response to the heated nature of the one-on-one campaign of the last couple of months, but were part of an aggressive effort as far back as November.
So, how offensive is this? I admit, I’m torn. The truth is, I have no idea if Blumenthal was endorsing the content, in addition to distributing it. The motivation might matter.
For example, Blumenthal sent around some garbage about Obama having communist ties, published by some Scaife-funded rag. Does Blumenthal really think Obama’s a communist? Probably not. Was he trying to get his journalist friends to believe Obama’s a communist? I doubt it. The more likely interpretation is that he was letting left-leaning writers know what kind of trash the right is going to throw at Obama. Blumenthal may have reveled in the right-wing smears, but it’s hard to believe he was actually endorsing content from Newsmax or AIM.
On the other hand, let’s say a top Obama advisor sent around a right-wing smear article about Hillary Clinton having a role in Vince Foster’s suicide. When pressed, the advisor says, “Oh, I don’t think Clinton had a role in Foster’s death, but I wanted reporters to know about it because the subject might come up in a general election.” The distinction wouldn’t much matter, and that advisor would be justifiably slammed, and probably fired, for peddling such an offensive smear.
As a practical matter, Blumenthal was dishing dirt to some pretty smart professionals, who, over time, probably started rolling their eyes when his emails would reach their inboxes. It almost certainly had no effect whatsoever on their reporting, and as soon as they saw the right-wing trash he was sending, they probably deleted it.
But in the end, I can’t help but think it was just a sleazy, hackish thing for Blumenthal to do. He’s a brilliant writer and an astute political observer, and he knows as well as anyone that the Republican smears he was sending around were a waste of bandwidth.