Clinton Continues Her Unrequited Romance with Conservative Media

If there's anyone alive who would not trust the vast right wing conspiracy, one would think it would be the person who coined the term, Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, the Clinton team, especially Bill Clinton have courted the conservative media since beginning of her first term in the Senate.  

Ben Smith laid out the details a few weeks ago:

From Rupert Murdoch to David Brooks to Matt Drudge, her campaign courted them with every instrument at its disposal, including targeted leaks and Bill Clinton's legendary personal charm.

But when Sen. Clinton's campaign started to stumble, those hard-won friends were the first to go. Murdoch's pet tabloid, the New York Post, repudiated her and endorsed Sen. Barack Obama. The Drudge Report rode her decline as gleefully as it watched her rise. And the pundit class moved from its grudging respect for Clinton into an infatuation with Obama...

Clinton's successful outreach to the right had three pillars: the conservative columnists who had begun to see her as the tough-minded centrist of the Democratic field; the media baron Rupert Murdoch; and the most powerful man in American political media, Matt Drudge, whose Drudge Report often sets the agenda for television coverage and broader political perceptions.

And if the conservative base hated her, many members of the conservative elite did not.

Some of the conservative elites thought she was OK because she initially supported the Iraq war, and as it went sour, she never apologized for her earlier support.  But, according to Smith, the columnists turned on her because the demands of a competitive nomination fight required her to move too far away from their position and toward the position of the 70% of the American public who want us out of Iraq.  It's unclear why Murdoch turned on her, but the Post endorsed Obama, and took this shot at Bill Clinton (whose foundation had even given a job to Murdoch's daughter-in-law):  

"Bill Clinton's thuggishly self-centered campaign antics conjure so many bad, sad memories that it's hard to know where to begin. Suffice it to say that his Peck's-Bad-Boy smirk — the Clinton trademark — wore thin a very long time ago," the paper wrote.

And Drudge?

Drudge "seems obsessed with making Hillary Clinton our next president," [New York Magazine] observed.

Some in Clinton's circle date the change in the tone of the Drudge Report to Oct. 22, when The New York Times published its own front-page look at the campaign's courtship of the website. The piece further elevated Drudge's stature. It also turned his professed affection for Clinton into conventional wisdom.

The Drudge Report soon shattered that conventional wisdom.

On Nov. 25, Drudge floated the rumor she was having a lesbian affair with an aide over the teasing headline, "Don't Go There."

Why bring this up today?  Because of this:

Clinton tells '700 Club' that some critics have asked for her forgiveness

Hillary Rodham Clinton this morning makes her first ever appearance on Christian Broadcasting Network's The 700 Club, CBN correspondent and blogger David Brody tells us.

That's right, Hillary Clinton did an interview for The 700 Club, the television show where Pat Robertson spews crazed and hateful rhetoric about anyone who's not an ultra-conservative evangelical Christian for a viewership of ultra-conservative evangelical Christians.  

What did she say?

But Clinton's fight against Obama goes deeper than the mailers being sent to voters.

Obama has been pulling crowds as large as 20,000 at some of his rallies. His charisma, charm and message of hope often have people in the audience crying -- literally.

"I think there is a certain phenomenon associated with this candidacy," she said during the CBN interview. "I am really struck by that because it is very much about him and his personality and his presentation."

But she warns that "it dangers or oversimplifies the complexity of the problems we face, the challenges of navigating our country through some difficult uncharted waters. We are a nation at war that seems to be forgotten."

And while it's no surprise that audiences are enchanted by Obama, it may surprise some that the media is taken by him too.

"I think that certainly is the topic of a lot of conversation, probably for good reason," she said. I think it's again a disservice first to the voters in the Democratic primaries, then to voters in general not to hold each of us to a very tough standard because we're trying for the toughest job in the world."

After being burned once by the VRWC, Hillary Clinton allowed herself to get burned a second time.  And she keeps going back, talking to media outlets that have long been hostile to her, that cater to audiences that include almost nobody who will vote for her.  

Campaign regularly do things unpopular with some constituency in an effort to court support with another constituency.  A campaign will do something that comes with negatives because, they estimate, the negatives will be outweighed by the expected positives.  But what possible good can come from wasting 25 minutes for an interview on the show made infamous by Pat Robertson?  And what good does it do her to parrot rightwing talking points about how we're a nation at war, as if the "experience" of George W. Bush and former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney hasn't been a disaster and proven that whether or not one has experience, the country should be led by people who at least have sound judgment.  

If Hillary Clinton fails to win the nomination—and right now just about every indication and trend is that she won't—one of the most fascinating subjects for the campaign autopsy will be why the campaign wasted so much time courting the conservative press, and why they were so naïve that they thoughtthe conservatives wouldn't turn on her like they always do.  

UPDATE Obama also did an interview with the same reporter from the 700 Club just prior to the South Carolina primary.  I don't see any point in him having done that interview either.  However, it was not a part of a pattern of reaching out in futility to the conservative media, as has been the case with Clinton.