I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Ben Smith, at The Politico, flags that today CNN’s running a ‘online poll’ asking if Barack Obama has enough patriotism to be president. As Ben, with some understatement, put it’s “it’s odd to see the mainstream media drive a largely whispered question that none of his main, named critics — Hillary, McCain, or the RNC — will touch.” Yeah, I’d say so.
That’s how it works. Starts at right-swing smear sites and hoax emails. Then the AP’s Nedra Pickler, who specializes in scooping up this slop and laundering it into the mainstream press, writes it up for the AP that runs across the country. And then picks it up and makes it a regular part of the campaign conversation.
I doubt some top exec at CNN came up with this or any name anchor. It’s some producer in the bowels of the operation. But it amounts to the same thing because it’s part of the culture and there’s no accountability.
Get ready for more.
Finally.
The long-awaited, much-anticipated 60 Minutes segment on the Don Siegelman case aired last night — except on one Alabama CBS affiliate, which mysteriously went dark.
You’ve probably already seen that blaring headline on Drudge’s site, alleging that Clinton staffers have been circulating a 2006 photo of Obama in the garb of a Somali village elder with a turban. The photo apparently comes from a 2006 congressional delegation he was on during his second year in the senate. The Obama campaign has now jumped on board slamming the Clinton campaign. (The pretty transparent subtext is that the picture has Obama looking done up like a guy you might see on some documentary on the Taliban, though obviously members of Congress try on local garb all the time when they’re on foreign trips.)
Now, Drudge’s claim is vague — who circulated it? and who did they circulate it to? And, in any case, this is Drudge. So as a fact witness his say-so is close to meaningless.
We spent the better part of the morning trying to get some comment from the Clinton campaign. For the first hour or more we couldn’t get anything. Then we got this statement in which the Clinton camp says Obama should be “ashamed” at saying the picture is “divisive,” without addressing one way or another what they’re accused of doing.
Here’s the text …
Enough.
If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.
This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry.
We will not be distracted.
Put it all together and the Clinton camp would appear to be unwilling to make even the most perfunctory denial that they are or were circulating this photo around.
We held up on this because we never want to take Drudge as a fact witness for anything. But I think the Clinton camp’s statement speaks for itself.
Late Update: The Clinton campaign has now put out a second statement that goes further but I think still basically amounts to the same thing. You be the judge. In any case, I know you come to TPM to find out what’s happening in politics not to get insights into our editorial process. But a number of readers have asked so, a little more detail. When we first heard about this brouhaha this morning, we didn’t want to do anything with it before we heard what the Clinton camp had to say, for the reasons I described in the initial post. We know that without doing some sort of exhausted internal investigation, there’s no way a national campaign can say that no one in their campaign had anything to do with it. There’s high-level staff, mid-level, hundreds of volunteers, etc. That’s not what we were looking for. In most cases, in a situation like this a campaign or in this case, say, perhaps Howard Wolfson or some other top level staff would say: “We don’t condone this. We didn’t authorize this. As far as we know no one in our organization had anything to do with this. Our campaign is made up of hundreds of people. So we can’t say definitively that someone somewhere didn’t make a stupid decision. But this isn’t something the campaign has anything to do with.” We pushed and pushed. But we didn’t get anything like that. The new statement goes further. But not that much. The Clinton campaign is either terribly inept at dealing with the story or they know or suspect that it’s accurate. In any case, what we try to do is give you the background to the blaring headlines you see and the benefit of what we find out through our own reporting. That’s just what we did in this case.
As we told you a few weeks back, late last year the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) kicked TPM off the department’s press list. Various explanations followed — like an apparent budget shortfall or bandwidth dearth that made the costs of sending us their email press releases prohibitive. A more likely explanation seemed to be the article TPMmuckraker.com’s Paul Kiel wrote at the end of August detailing the litany of false statements DOJ spokesman Brian Roehrkasse had made during the course of the US Attorney scandal before being promoted to Director of the Office of Public Affairs at the end of last summer. Our banning took place shortly after he took over.
In any case, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and others took the matter up with Attorney General Mukasey. And it would seem that after he found out what had actually happened he decided to do the right thing and have us reinstated.
The press releases and information alerts started showing up in our in-boxes again on Friday afternoon.
Roehrkasse is now telling the New York Times that the issue was simply one of whether or not TPM was a “credentialed” news organization. But suffice it to say that we are no more ‘credentialed’ today than we were in October. So I’ll let people draw their own conclusions.
In any case, we appreciate being reinstated. It helps us do our work.
On a conference call, Howard Wolfson just made pretty much the kind of ‘loosely categorical’ statement about the Obama picture that I said in the post below that we were surprised not to have heard. Here’s our report on the conference call.
Obama up four points in Texas, according to latest CNN poll.