Reality Land and Dirty Tricks

Dirty trick season is here. The Clinton camp's newest panic-mode effort is a sad strategy to put Barack Obama's admitted teen drug use back into the headlines. Obama wrote about his drug use in his own book, long before he was running for anything. He has talked openly about it on the campaign trail as recently as last week. Rival candidates have not made a fuss about it, as they shouldn't really, because it's highly irrelevant today.

But a Clinton adviser, in an interview with The Washington Post, said his past drug use should be an issue, pushing the story into headlines and making it an issue just before the voting starts in Iowa. Clinton's camp distanced itself from the remarks and the operative later said he shouldn't have made them. But this is classic dirty trickery at work.

What likely happened was that somewhere deep in the Clinton strategy center, probably a tense place right now as Mrs. Inevitable has slipped in the polls, it was decided that they needed a torpedo. But Clinton cannot just stand up and add a paragraph about cocaine to her stump speech. They pick a sacrificial operative to let the issue slip, then distance themselves from the remarks. Then the operative apologizes, and everyone live happily ever after.

But the job is done. Who benefits from this mistake? Obviously the Clinton camp. Most folks will buy the fairy tale that the operative wasn't speaking for the campaign and that no one planned this whole gig.

In Reality Land, this was almost certainly an orchestrated move. A brilliant, sad, well executed move.