Bill Clinton Sends Letter to NYT's Frank Rich Defending Hillary

Just how much is former President Bill Clinton throwing his weight around in pressrooms across the country to ensure favorable coverage of his wife and her campaign?

As NewsBusters reported in September, Clinton killed a negative article about Hillary that was about to be published by GQ apparently by threatening the magazine with not having access to him in the future.

On Sunday, the New York Times' Frank Rich admitted that after he wrote a column in November that included some criticism of the junior senator from New York, her husband sent him a letter valiantly coming to her defense (emphasis added throughout):

In a two-page handwritten letter in response to a recent column of mine criticizing Mrs. Clinton's Senate votes on Iraq and Iran, Bill Clinton made a serious and impassioned defense of her foreign-policy record. On the subject of her support for the so-called Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran this fall, Mr. Clinton wrote: "If Senator Obama, for example, had really believed it was an indirect authorization to attack Iran, he would not have stayed away on the campaign trail, but would have come back to vote against it." That's a fair point - and a fair criticism of Mr. Obama as he continues to vilify this particular Hillary Clinton vote. If voting for Kyl-Lieberman was as grave a step toward war as Mr. Obama claims, there's no excuse for his absence.

Yet, much as NewsBusters has suggested that Bill's criticism of NBC's Tim Russert might have backfired on him and his wife, Rich still seemed willing to call a spade a spade after receiving the former President's correspondence:

Mr. Clinton's narrow defense of his wife's Iraq vote in 2002 - it was not "a blanket authorization to go to war," he wrote - doesn't persuade me. But even if it did, her choice for foreign-policy director in 2008 makes me question her ability to profit from experience and make a clean break with the establishment thinking in both parties that enabled the Iraq fiasco. Judgment calls like this rather than failures of the press may answer her husband's question as to why the public finds her experience "irrelevant."

What Mrs. Clinton clearly has learned from her White House experience, as she reminds us, is to strike back at her critics. Unfortunately, she has assimilated those critics' methods as well. Attacks on Mr. Obama's record and views are fair game. But the steady personal attacks - the invocations of "cocaine" and "Hussein" and "madrassa" by surrogates - smell like the dirty tricks of the old Clinton haters. The Clinton-camp denials that these tactics have been "authorized" sound like Karl Rove's denials of similar smear campaigns against John McCain in 2000.

As Rich has worked for the Times since 1980, it appears he can't be bullied the way the folks at GQ were in September.

However, in how many newsrooms across the country are younger, less confident "journalists" massaging their reports as a result of such pressure from the former President?