Back in early 2004, my recollection is sometime in February but certainly by March anyway, rumors about John Kerry having fabricated parts of his military service record began appearing in the sewers of right-wing thought like Free Republic. By early May, the group "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" had formally organized and held a press conference. The Kerry campaign did respond with a brief press conference of their own, but after that they appear to have adopted a strategy of "ignore them and they'll go away." For three and a half months there was silence on this topic from the campaign and its supporters. The theory, I assume, was "don't punch down" because that only inflates the influence of the punchee. As a result, these ideas festered for month after month. It wasn't until the Swiftvets started running TV ads in mid-August that the campaign rolled out surrogates like Wesley Clark and Max Cleland to try to hit back - far too late and far too ineffectively.
It doesn't matter that the Swiftvets narrative was entirely false. By letting it bubble in the public's mind for so long essentially unanswered the smear had its intended effect. Was this the whole reason Kerry lost? Of course not. But it was a contributing factor.
And something very similar is going on right now with regard to Secretary Clinton and the stories about classified information on her email server. In both cases there's a strong asymmetry of information. The Swift Boat operations were largely shrouded in secrecy, so it was possible for people who certainly had first-person knowledge of them to make any assertions whatsoever without the public being equipped to evaluate the truth of those assertions. They were there, so they must know right? Similarly in the email stories people on the inside, whether Republican congressmen or staffers or members of the Intelligence Community, can make broad characterizations that paint things in the worst possible light, relying on the laws about revealing classified content to constrain Clinton and her defenders from effectively countering those claims. Once again the public has little knowledge of how all this works and falls back on some vague “where there’s smoke there must be fire somewhere” feeling.
Now maybe the Republican clown car is such a disaster this year that none of this matters. But I don’t think any of us should be counting on that. If Secretary Clinton is to be our nominee, she needs to be in the strongest possible position to defeat the Republican nominee this fall. And for all that Donald Trump is a despicable man, he understands something all too many politicians don’t: counter-punching works. If someone hits you, hit ‘em back twice as hard at once.
As I demonstrated in my last diary, the latest iteration of this attack is the non-credible claim that an email from Sid Blumenthal to Sec. Clinton which was released by the State Department in completely unredacted form contains verbatim quotes from several highly classified NSA reports. That almost certainly cannot be true but emanating as it appears it does from elements inside the IC we are again faced with that asymmetry of information: people inside the IC know things the public cannot know and therefore the public places implicit trust in assertions made by those in the know. I contend that this kind of thing requires immediate and authoritative repudiation. Laughing it off or ignoring it doesn’t do it.
Ideally, President Obama would instruct the DNI to issue a statement clearly saying this latest claim is false and reminding members of the IC that playing politics in this fashion is not tolerated.