Hillary!
  • Hillary!
I'm reading David Plouffe's Audacity to Win right now, and in the flashback-inducing section on the endless Democratic presidential primary race in 2008, there's a passage about Hillary Clinton that made me think of Dino Rossi.

In this section, Plouffe, who helped manage Barack Obama's presidential campaign, takes the reader back to that long-ago time before Obama was president (or even the Democratic nominee), and he mentions how frustrating it was, at certain moments during the presidential primaries, to have investigative reporters poring over Obama's past while giving Clinton a relative pass. There's an easy explanation for why this happened. Obama was new to national politics and had a fascinating past that hadn't yet been combed through, the perfect ingredients for exciting reporting and interesting news stories. Clinton's past, on the other hand, was old news to everyone involved.

Still, it was frustrating for Obama's campaign to be under the microscope in a way that Clinton wasn't. As Plouffe writes:

The most damaging media scrutiny when it comes to campaigns is of the investigative variety. And from Day One, reporters had been putting us through those paces, examining every episode and era of Barack Obama's life.

Odd though it seems, Clinton had gone through little such scrutiny. We asked reporters and their bosses why they didn't pursue investigative pieces on her. The answers were variations on a theme. "All that's old news," we were told. "It was covered in the '90s." This sounded almost irresponsible. In our view, all the issues from the 1980s and '90s—the travel office, the Rose law firm, and so forth—merited fresh attention, even if only as a bearing to gauge her electability; certainly the GOP would use these episodes against here. And what about the seven years since the Clintons had left the White House?

A similar phenomenon is benefiting Dino Rossi as he makes his third run for high office in Washington State, this time against Democratic Senator Patty Murray. The guy's got baggage, no doubt. And trust me, there's not a political reporter in this state whose in-box hasn't been full of almost daily reminders about that baggage since Rossi declared his candidacy. The Democratic message machine has made sure of that.

The problem is, even if it's relevant to Rossi's Senate candidacy that, for example, he got his start in real estate from a man who soon went to jail for defrauding investors, or that he bought apartment complexes with a man now accused of running a $100 million Ponzi scheme, it all feels like old news—especially to political reporters and editors who have been putting together stories on this stuff since Rossi's first failed run for governor in 2004.

Now, the analogy only works as far as it goes. In this race, Patty Murray is no Barack Obama circa 2008 (not a relative unknown, not a person with potentially juicy Indonesian elementary school papers to dig into). She's been in the Senate since 1992; there are plenty of votes and donations and promises to look at, and they're being looked at. (As are Rossi's votes and promises while he was in the Washington State senate way back when.)

Still, when it comes to stories that dig into a candidate's past relationships and business associations, Rossi does seem to have lucked into the Hillary Clinton circa 2008 position. Most of the people who would write those investigative stories about Rossi have written them all before, don't want to write them again, and did such a thorough job on them in 2004 and 2008 that there's not much new dirt for anyone else to dig up. Plus, he doesn't have an 18-years-long Senate record to comb through. Thus, Rossi ends with a relative pass on his past in 2010. As they say, third time's a charm.