Subject: CTR Featured in Slate: Ready for Anything
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 18:47:28 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

Today, Correct The Record was featured in a piece by Slate's David Weigel.
We thought you all might want to check it out. Have a great evening!

*Slate: Ready for Anything
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/david_brock_s_correct_the_record_the_former_right_wing_operative_is_hillary.html>*

“The great thing about the book tour, from my vantage point, as a guy from
Mississippi who’s worked all over the country, is that Secretary Clinton
hasn’t gone out with a giant stash of canned answers,” says Strider. “She
doesn’t go out with a tested message. She’s talking from answering and
reacting to questions. You look at her town hall on CNN, on Charlie Rose,
she’s had an incredibly successful couple of months chatting with the
American people.”

*Slate: Ready for Anything
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/david_brock_s_correct_the_record_the_former_right_wing_operative_is_hillary.html>*

By David Weigel

July 29, 2014

[Subtitle:] David Brock’s super PAC network is fending off every attack on
Hillary Clinton. The book tour is barely the end of Round 1.

Hillary Clinton’s face looms over the offices of Correct the Record—in a
friendly way. The young PR operation’s 18 workers do their typing and
designing and debunking next to a blown-up version of that 2011 photo in
which the former secretary of state is checking her BlackBerry on a flight
from Malta to Tripoli, behind dark sunglasses. That photo inspired the
Texts From Hillary Tumblr, and was painted on the Ready for Hillary PAC’s
bus before it started schlepping around the country.

It’s kitsch from Clinton’s finest hour, from the postelection, pre-Benghazi
period when a pundit could call her “a great secretary of state” and hear
no coughing or guffawing. A few steps away, past the shelves full of David
Brock’s books—his 2002 memoir of the conservative movement he left, and the
much less heretical 2012 The Fox Effect—sits American Bridge’s president,
Brad Woodhouse.

American Bridge is the permanent campaign that’s currently trying to save
the election for Democrats. Correct the Record, launched in November 2013,
is a subsidiary focused on the next election. Both organizations live to
fight Republicans, just as Media Matters—the Brock project from which all
of this grew—lives to rebut “conservative misinformation” in the press.

But Media Matters and American Bridge respond to everything. Correct the
Record has only one mission. In an interview with David Freedlander, Brock
said he dreamed up the project after Republicans held hearing after hearing
on Benghazi. “There was no, or limited, capacity for her to deal with the
range of attacks,” he said, referring to Clinton. In October, Brock
co-authored a book titled The Benghazi Hoax, and within weeks Correct the
Record was there to insist that “Hillary Clinton was the ‘most on top of
the situation’ on the night of the attack.”

I dropped by the Brock-verse a few weeks after the release of Clinton’s
memoir Hard Choices. The conventional wisdom is that the tour could have
gone better—more book sales, fewer verbal somersaults about her wealth and
gay marriage stance.

Correct the Record wants everyone to know that the media blew it. It had
been sending out weekly updates of Clinton book sales, because there was a
story out there that she was flopping. The first memo, from July 2, ran to
more than 4,000 words, and insisted, “Critics have praised the authenticity
and insight of the former Secretary of State’s new memoir” and that “Hard
Choices sold more in its third week than Rand Paul and Jeb Bush’s books did
total, combined!” (Exclamation point in the original.)

Woodhouse wants me to appreciate the long game that CTR is playing. They
don’t just do rapid response, though of course they’re “very good” at it.

If you gaze too deeply at Correct the Record, you start to wonder if you’ve
been too critical of the Clintons.

“You can hand people a list of 100 Hillary Clinton accomplishments, or 30,
or whatever, from the State Department or her life, and nobody’s even
reporting on them,” says Woodhouse, sitting behind his two computer screens
and a TV tuned to MSNBC. “They’re reporting on whether she had a gaffe. But
one thing Correct the Record is doing is citing and placing a lot of
op-eds, putting surrogates out on TV, to talk about her accomplishments.
And all that stuff is going to be somewhere for someone to use later on.”

Right. It’s not like CTR can force the media to use this material. It can
only politely inform the press that it’s falling for right-wing spin. CTR’s
own spin has described an attack on the Clintons’ wealth as an attack on
the “profoundly American success and philanthropy of Bill and Hillary
Clinton,” and criticism of her speaking fees as “relentlessly attacking
Hillary Clinton for raising money for universities.”

If this came from an actual campaign, reporters would choke on the
chutzpah. But it doesn’t. It comes from a small group led by Burns Strider,
who happened to be a senior adviser to the 2008 Clinton campaign, and who
argues that Clinton’s book tour was an unqualified win.

“The great thing about the book tour, from my vantage point, as a guy from
Mississippi who’s worked all over the country, is that Secretary Clinton
hasn’t gone out with a giant stash of canned answers,” says Strider. “She
doesn’t go out with a tested message. She’s talking from answering and
reacting to questions. You look at her town hall on CNN, on Charlie Rose,
she’s had an incredibly successful couple of months chatting with the
American people.”

If you gaze too deeply at Correct the Record, you start to wonder if you’ve
been too critical of the Clintons. That is by design. The outfit has
studiously avoided intrigue and invited plenty of reporters into the inner
sanctum. (This piece is at least the third that begins with a tour of the
CTR bunker, though each reporter got a different estimate of the total
staff—from 16 to 18 to 20.) Strider will even discuss how the organization
might fend off attacks if Clinton draws a challenge from the left. “If
Clinton chooses to run,” he says, “she’s gonna articulate her record for
the future and I’d be very surprised to find it not much in line with her
friends from the left.”

And Brock is happy to describe what he learned in his wild days as a
right-wing hack, and why the facts brought him to liberalism and the
defense of the Clintons. In Blinded by the Right, he describes in detail
how the right first turned on him when his reporting for a Hillary bio
turned out nuanced instead of vitriol.

“Back when I wrote The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, I wrote something to
the effect that I thought her potential as a political leader was such that
she might end up being a more historic figure than her husband,” remembers
Brock. “I think the potential is still there. I try to make sure, through
our work, that she gets a fair hearing, and that the media environment
isn’t clogged with misinformation.”

Brock goes through all of the hits on Clinton, and explains why they
fizzled—why they were predestined to fizzle. What about the Benghazi
attack, the one that led to Correct the Record’s very existence?

“The Benghazi issue is almost like birtherism at this point,” says Brock.
“I don’t think it’s doing real damage. If it’s a question of where Benghazi
sits in the mainstream discourse, it’s largely been contained. I think we
had a fair amount to do with that.”

How about the Washington Free Beacon’s report that dredged up—with fresh
audio—the story of a young Hillary Clinton defending a child rapist?

“It was very misleading in the way it was presented, and wrong,” says
Brock. “So again, I don’t think … ” He pauses. “It got some attention and
broke through to some extent, but when real reporters looked at it, it
fizzled.”

And what about the current wave of Clinton books? Correct the Record tears
through them, but has discovered that they need little rebutting. No one in
the mainstream media (excluding Fox News and the New York Post) did much
with Ed Klein’s Blood Feud and its mysteriously sourced quasi-scoops.
Daniel Halper’s Clinton, Inc., released a month after Hard Choices, was the
sort of book a young Brock might have written, with named sources backing
up some of the best stories. But it was no real threat to Hillary.

“I don’t believe it’s going to succeed as well as other conservative books
in the marketplace,” says Brock. “The basic approach he seems to take is
that he will give you a page or two of essentially rumor or speculation,
that a lot of us who are plugged into the world have heard. Then he backs
out of it with various caveats. I think he doesn’t deliver the kind of red
meat that an Ed Klein has delivered. The conservative audience—it doesn’t
do caveats. And as far as its reach into mainstream conversation, there
hasn’t been much pickup. Reporters don’t feel like any new ground has been
plowed there at all.”

I ping Halper and tell him what Brock thinks of his book. In no time at
all, Halper points me to the rules of Clinton PR that he identified in his
reporting, and identifies this as No. 3: “make any allegation unfavorable
to the Clintons” into “old news.”