Inside the beast: How the Clinton, Obama camps spread bad news about the other

Peter Dreier over at the Huffington Post's "Off The Bus" site has an interesting piece  that outs longtime Clintonite Sidney Blumenthal as a disseminator of anti-Obama e-mail, some of it drawn from the "vast right wing conspiracy" that Blumenthal helped define.

What's interesting here isn't that  Blumenthal is distributing this stuff -- political reporters, including us Ticketers, get this kind of e-mail all the time from partisans. But it's useful for close watchers of politics -- i.e., Ticket readers -- to digest Dreier's piece as a look inside how some of the candidates' supporters operate. While the piece is specifically about Blumenthal, he is not alone in making sure that journalists and bloggers see whatever is new and nasty about the candidates the activists oppose. Sometimes the campaigns themselves send out the e-mails.

It's all part of the game, one that many political reporters take as part of the process as we try to figure out where the spin ends and the truth begins. But Dreier's piece also helps illuminate the depths some folks go to to influence coverage and perceptions. Email, in a lot of ways, is the new whisper campaign.

-- Scott Martelle