Opinion: How the Clintons control their image

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Presidential campaigns have an invisible guerrilla war constantly underway. It involves information, the collecting of it, the cross-referencing, the trading and the use of it to help your candidate or news outlet.

Political reporters get tips almost daily from contacts in one campaign with disparaging information about another. They’re offered favorable news about one candidate in advance of competitors in hopes of receiving better play.

Reporters seeking to develop news sources inside campaigns routinely chat with their contacts and exchange information and rumors, some of them true, all of them the commercial currency of such professional relationships. Reporters deemed more sympathetic to a candidate are more likely to gain access or story tips. These info exchanges are especially useful for campaigns trying to head off trouble.

That’s how, early this summer, Hillary Clinton’s campaign got wind of a story planned for the men’s magazine GQ. The subject concerned infighting within the particularly tightly-closed cadre of Clinton confidantes. Such a story in such a publication devoted to men’s fashion and grooming would hardly derail her well-oiled candidacy. It would simply show the human foibles of co-workers laboring long days and short nights under intense pressure and would, at most, fuel the political gossip mill for a few days.

All candidates would like to control what’s written and said about them. But the Clintonistas, like George W. Bush’s Texans led by Karen Hughes, like Control with a capital C. They also, according to a revealing article on Politico.com, did not like the author of the proposed piece, Josh Green, who’d written an Atlantic Monthly story on Sen. Clinton last year that found her to be a calculating non-crusader full of little ideas and more determined to rehabilitate her political image than accomplish any big feats for New York.

Now, coincidental to this development, GQ was negotiating a cover story on former president ...

Bill Clinton for its lucrative December Man of the Year issue. In the magazine world Clinton’s image, like Princess Diana’s, is thought to drive up newsstand sales. A writer, George Saunders, had already traveled to Africa with Clinton in July.

Now you see the campaign’s leverage developing through the former president’s celebrity. It’s a most useful tool that has, for instance, enabled the senator’s campaign to negotiate unedited TV interviews when she announced last winter and to appear last weekend on all five major Sunday news talk shows.

As Green continued his reporting, involving internal criticism of campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, concern grew among the Clintons. Finally, Jay Carson, a spokesman for Bill Clinton delivered the news to GQ editor Jim Nelson: the former president would become very unavailable if the critical Green piece on his wife’s campaign appeared.

Such a quandary. The holiday issue is a huge moneymaker and the prospect of added sales because of a Bill Clinton cover was tempting. But what about journalistic integrity?

There was some internal debate. Nelson made the call. ‘I don’t really get into the inner workings of the magazine,’ Nelson told Politico.com, ‘but I can tell you that yes, we did kill a Hillary piece.’ The Clinton campaign refused comment.

So Hillary Clinton avoided one more negative media story and the front-running Democrat keeps on keeping on.

Thus endeth the political lesson for today.

--Andrew Malcolm