Clinton Dramas: Here We Go Again

Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By Maggie Haberman.

Tabloid headlines. Personal dramas. Organizational disarray. Score-settling between rival factions documented in news accounts like a soap opera.

Does this have a familiar ring?

No one — or mostly no one — truly believes the swirl of headlines surrounding Bill and Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2013 should lead to a grand conclusion about whether another iteration of a Clinton campaign can be run effectively, free of the internecine warfare and incessant drama that marked her 2008 bid.

But if Clinton and her supporters were hoping to allay those doubts well ahead of a possible 2016 run, the past few months have not been helpful.

Clinton supporters would point out, fairly, that much of what has happened to them this summer — the steady stream of unseemly stories about Anthony Weiner’s continued virtual liaisons, his wife and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s very public decision to stand by him, and reports of mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation — has been beyond their control.

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David Brock accuses N.Y. Times of anti-Clinton bias

By Dylan Byers.

David Brock, the chairman of both Media Matters for America and American Bridge super PAC, has written an open letter to The New York TImes expressing his “concern about a recent string of reports and columns … that have done nothing but use false pretenses to cast a shadow on Bill and Hillary Clinton.”

Brock highlights the Times’ Aug. 13 report on “unease” over finances and management at the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation (“an exercise in evidence-free speculation,” according to Brock) and two recent columns from Maureen Dowd that Brock says “reinforce her long pattern of using hollow caricatures to attack the Clintons (and the former first family in general).”

Brock then calls on the Times to: “Correct the record regarding errors of fact and context in the Foundation news story … Refrain from negatively pre-judging the Clintons in the manner of your political editor … Correct the anti-Clinton animus consistently exhibited by one of your columnists; and … Resist the temptation to create purely speculative news in your new Clinton ‘beat.'”

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