Iowan Chase Martyn on Clinton Staffer Email Smear
05 December 2007 2:38 pm by Taylor Marsh
Bottom line, it was a “rogue agent,” in Martyn’s judgment. Chase
Martyn, managing editor of Iowa Independent, is on my radio show every Wednesday.
We always have lively discussions. We got into quite a back and forth last week
and do on many occasions, but we both respect and enjoy the discourse. The topic
straight out of the gate today was on the story of a Clinton staffer in Iowa
sending around a smear on Obama, which began with a DailyKos
comment. Greg Sargent has the
entire email. The smear email chain was denounced
earlier by a Clinton staffer when this surfaced previously, with Politico.com
having the email proving the staffer’s disgust at anyone believing such
slurs.
The rough transcript of Chase’s response is below, but listen to the
podcast of my radio show to get the full story.
I will take the unusual step of defending the Clinton campaign for a second.
… … This whole type of spat has happened before in this campaign cycle.
It is not at all unprecedented. Over the summer on the Republican side, and
of course the Republicans are always way ahead on these email campaigns than
the Democrats are, a Brownback county chair was actually given a volunteer
position even higher than county chair, she was like a regional chair or something
got caught sending out some pretty nasty emails on Romney, and the Brownback
campaign was forced to repudiate her. … … At a certain point, once an
organization gets so big, all these field organizations face intense pressure
to put names down for country coordinators in each of the counties they’re
in charge of and at a certain point when you’re getting close to a deadline,
and I’ve been there myself to pick these county chairs, you pick somebody,
you don’t have a ton of time to vet them and you put their name down as your
county coordinator so that the campaign can send out a press release saying
we have country coordinators in this many counties. It’s not something
that the campaigns will take seriously at the level of county chairs. It’s
an honorary position that in some counties is important and in other counties
the organizers don’t really do anything with the county chair and it’s just
a title in name only. It really isn’t, I don’t think you could make the case
that this email forwarding had anything, at least that the Clinton campaign
told the person to do it or that this person was even in regular contact with
the Clinton campaign more than say once a week. It’s possible that they are,
but this probably just a rogue agent, who may or may not even thought about
it when this person forwarded around this email. It’s not something that I
think you can blame the campaign for too much. You can blame some of the campaign
supporters for it, but the campaign probably officially had absolutely nothing
to do with it and no knowledge of it ahead of time. … … The country coordinator
position is not a major position that is much power, really, outside of being
a name on a press release and potentially calling some other contact in a
particular county to recruit more supporters. …. (TM asks if David Yepsen
will write about it.) … ..Yepsen might write about it. I hope he doesn’t
try to blow it out of proportion, although he has a tendency to blow strange
things out of proportion all the time. .. … … Obama has been the subject
of a lot of different types of emails. But I should also say though that on
a daily basis I get far worse emails accusing Hillary Clinton of things than
anything… .. … but the things I get told about Hillary Clinton on a daily
basis are just so much worse. … ..
