I'm really trying to be fair to Hillary

As this campaign continues on, I keep trying to be fair to Hillary. I keep reminding myself that I worked for Bill Clinton (I answered his mail as part of the Transition Team in '92), that I moved to Washington anticipating his victory, and that I was part of an amazing group of people that were inspired by him. I keep reminding myself that Hillary is smart, competent, and, I'd like to think, a basically decent person. I keep reminding myself that she has spent decades working on behalf of children. That she's a Democrat, and that would be better in the White House than just about any Republican.

But then she goes on Bill O'Reilly's show and attacks Obama over Jeremiah Wright. I'm not going to link to that, because I don't want to listen to Bill O'Reilly. And the people who accuse her of using GOP tactics, like Andrew Sullivan, keep making more and more sense. And then she lies about some part of the delegate math, and someone at Daily Kos or Talking Points Memo rips her to pieces for twisting the facts. And then one of her consiglieres like Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson says something nasty or ridiculous or both. I judge a politician in part on the quality of the people they hire. Bill Clinton had, in this respect, excellent judgment. I can't really remember disagreeing with any of his Cabinet appointments, at least not in a strong way.

But then there's the people that Hillary has surrounded herself with. Many of them are old Bill Clinton operatives. I suppose I didn't see them being nasty because I was on their side. And they were very much behind the scenes. But now they just seem like vicious people who have no soul, who have forgotten the reasons why they got involved in politics, if those reasons were anything like why I did. Peter Dreier dissects Sydney Blumenthal's constant attacks on Obama. He really does channel sewage from the fringe of the right wing, and, by applying whatever patina of credibility he has left as a Democrat, gives it some shred of credibility.

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama's character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers -- including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists.

One positive aspect of this godawful long campaign is that the longer it goes on, the more Hillary is being exposed as the wrong kind of person to be president. Someone said at the beginning of this campaign (I think it was a columnist in the Financial Times) that nothing exposes character flaws like an American presidential campaign. Amen for that.