Clinton and Drudge: Traffic, And Red Meat To The Base
Yesterday, the NYT's Jim Rutenberg looked at the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Matt Drudge, noting that the Clinton campaign had found a way to work with Drudge, former arch-nemesis of the Lewinsky scandal, by seeding certain items with him via a tacit working relationship with a staffer. (It's a relationship that one might call a delicate dance.) My HuffPo colleague Jason Linkins gave his take, suggesting that Drudge is less working "with" Hillary than blithely taking whatever she throws him and enjoying the traffic surge. Fair enough — that's certainly a synergy that has been noted — but I'm going to add a second, more Machiavellian hypothesis: Drudge is pushing Clinton so she'll win the nomination — and lose the election.
We've seen it already in the GOP debates: Hillary Clinton is the common enemy, a hugely polarizing figure for Republicans, the candidate of choice to vilify in debates and warn darkly about as the embodiment of all that is liberal, while meanwhile the GOP discourse has run to emphasizing the Conservative with a capital "C." Drudge has not come this far in the internet age (with the worst graphics ever and nary a redesign) without getting it, and that he gets — and seems to be on board with. As much as he may promote Clinton by giving her the spotlight, he does not read as her fan — there is definitely snark there; after all, as The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias pointed out in looking at the relationship earlier this month: "His site isn't merely an appendage of the conservative message machine, but it's mostly an appendage of the conservative message machine."
As such, Drudge gets that Hillary is supremely polarizing...so polarizing that she's the kind of Democratic nominee who could spur Republicans to the polls in the way gay marriage did in 2004, maybe even swing some voters. He — like Oprah! — is well-aware of his influence as not only a Conservative outlet but also as a traffic-driving juggernaut, and in this case, for this purpose, is putting it to good use. It's not necessarily that an Obama candidacy would be any less polarizing for the GOP, ultimately — or even anyone else — but no other candidate comes with a decade of built-in knee-jerk visceral hate quite like Hillary Clinton. Drudge knows this, and knows that even against a field of not-quite-right candidates — Giuliani striking out with Values Voters, Fred Thompson coming late to the party with sub-par firepower, Romney just not quite as Reaganesque as he'd like to project — a Hillary nomination would make any Republican candidate look good. At this stage, that kind of logic is working for both of them — if they are indeed working toward a common goal. Now that's a delicate dance.
NYT Misses True Nature of Clinton-Drudge Relationship [HuffPolitics]
Clinton Finds Way To Play Along With Drudge Report [NYT]
Photo courtesy of Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic.
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Huffington Post | Rachel Sklar | October 23, 2007 09:00 AM