Go into the right. For the second Monday in a row, David Kirkpatrick lands on A1 with a Big Insight about the politics surrounding the new Clinton autobiography. Today's extraordinary revelation: Conservatives are set to party like it's 1998!

It's a snarky quote-a-palooza from the usual nutballs and timeservers and "we were impeachers once, and young" types. Kirkpatrick has successfully adapted Adam Nagourney's production model (thumb through Rolodex, collect insider quotes that spin in the right direction, spend hard half-hour typing it all up, knock off for early martini) to his own beat, working the conservative movement. The following is a compressed but reasonably accurate representation [formatted without ellipses for readability]:

Rush Limbaugh has begun calling the book "My Lie." A column in the American Spectator, once the leading journal of Clinton-bashing, pronounced "a long hot Clinton summer is upon us" and derided Mr. Clinton's expressions of contrition for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In the conservative Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes called Mr. Clinton "Calvin Coolidge without the ethics and self-restraint." Keith Appel, a Republican media consultant, said that the Web-based Drudge Report is playing a leading role again. "The airwaves are hot with it already, bringing back all the bad news about the Clinton impeachment, lying under oath, the stain he has brought on the presidency. It helps remind people that the Bush administration is the antithesis of Clinton." Bush campaign allies are reviving talk about the honor and dignity of the Oval Office in thinly veiled references to the Clinton years. "Whatever disagreements you may have with President Bush on one issue or another, nobody can argue that he hasn't restored honor to the White house," said Gary L. Bauer. Grover G. Norquist said that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 the Bush administration had failed to blame the Clinton administration enough. Now, Mr. Norquist said, the discussion of Mr. Clinton's book offered Republicans another chance to blame him. Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant, argued that what would hurt Mr. Kerry most was standing to the left of Mr. Clinton. "[The Lewinsky affair] is Clinton's legacy," said Bob Barr, who will be promoting own book about the impeachment, "The Meaning of Is," when it appears later this summer.

"Clinton Book Puts Familiar Foe Back in Conservatives' Sights"

Nice of Kirkpatrick to give a plug to Bob Barr, isn't it? I imagine he can use the hand. Any of you who want to towel off, now's a good time to do it.

[I'm particularly fond, by the way, of Gary Bauer's idea that this is the right time to revive the old "restoring honor and dignity to the White House" gag. Here's a thought, Gary, you dickless weasel: why don't you ask this guy, or any of the other folks you can see here, what the most meaningful contemporary context for the phrase "stain on the presidency" might be?]

There's actually the germ of a real story buried in the late grafs of Kirkpatrick's article:

Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of conservative direct mail, ... [said] that Mr. Clinton's tenure in office was a powerful stimulant to fund-raising. For those potential donors not fully convinced that Mr. Clinton's liberal policies on abortion or gay rights would contribute to the decline of the traditional family, conservatives say, the scandals of his personal life provided an illustration.

[David] Bossie of Citizens United appeared cognizant of Mr. Clinton's fund-raising power. In an e-mail message alerting potential supporters to the advertisement during "60 Minutes," Mr. Bossie noted, "As you can probably imagine running such campaigns is not inexpensive, and this is why we have to ask all of your support."

A journalist might have found an angle on the story in this devil's tango between a demonized politician and the right-wing money operation that throve on him. Kirkpatrick's too busy running the quote-o-matic, though, to find time for it.

Sounds like a real piece, doesn't it—the conservative money factory in the post-Clinton era? Tailor-made, even, for the Times' designated reporter on the conservative movement. You can bet that Kirkpatrick won't be writing the story any time soon, though. Pious objections from Bill Keller's notwithstanding, David Kirkpatrick is much more the paper's ambassador to the movement than an investigator of it. You get the sense in the article today that Kirkpatrick feels just a touch naughty mentioning Bossie's fund-raising email—like he's giving just the least little tweak at a winger's tail. [No notice in the piece, by the way, of the fact that CBS is violating its own professed "advocacy" standard by agreeing to air Bossie's ad.] That tweak is about as rough a gesture as Kirkpatrick can afford, though: he knows who's buttering his bread. The limits, as Keller should certainly have foreseen, are built in to Kirkpatrick's assignment, given the unimaginative kind of reporter he is and the compromised kind of mandate (get access!) he's been handed. The conservos are a notoriously xenophobic and thin-skinned bunch, after all—even if you're not a representative of the evillibrul New York Times—and how is an access whore like Kirkpatrick going to work the beat if none of them will return his calls?

posted by michael  6:47:59 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Shameless ripoff of Eric Umansky, in Slate's Today's Papers, who makes a necessary observation about the Times' massive lead story today (Tim Golden and Donv Van Natta, Jr., "U.S. Said to Overstate Value of Guantánamo Detainees"):

The Times deserves credit for delving deep into this. But the truth is, as TP's new blog mentioned last week, this story has been sitting around waiting for someone to jump on it. In a snoozer of a NYT piece about Gitmo last April, the 20th paragraph mentioned: "Officials said only a small number of the detainees are members of al-Qaida. The rest have either been determined to be nobodies, rounded up in the chaotic aftermath of the war, or presumed to be nobodies whose state has not yet been determined." The only reason this stuff is getting flagged now is that the abuse photos—or really, the response to them—conferred Big Story status on the United States' treatment of prisoners, so editors going aggressive on it would be going with the flow rather than the scarier proposition of striking out their own. Or as Michael Massing recently put it in the New York Review of Books, the Times waited to dig into the mistreatment until after it had "been ratified as important."

And let me highlight that TP's new blog reference. Eric's been doing a fine job writing the Slate feature, which is a consistently valuable resource, and it's nice to see he's going to be extending that work into the blog space.

posted by michael  12:11:29 PM  
tell me about it []