Silly Suck-Up-To-Drudge Moment Of The Day
February 11, 2008 -- 12:32 PM EST // //

That's the name of a new feature that we'll be running on this blog as circumstances warrant.

The idea is that to a far greater degree than you might think, reporters go out of their way to find fake reasons to give plugs to Drudge -- and even at times tailor their own work -- specifically to get linked on his site.

This morning, in a piece piece that touched on the timing of the departure yesterday of Hillary campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, New York Times reporter Kit Seeyle managed to throw a bone to Drudge with this mystifying line:

Some Clinton advisers rued the timing, noting that Matt Drudge referred to the switch on his Web site as the departure of the campaign’s “top Latina” — an emphasis on Ms. Doyle’s ethnicity that Mrs. Clinton does not need as she heads toward a Texas primary on March 4 and tries to court the state’s large Hispanic vote.

Why the gratuitous plug for Drudge? After all, this is hardly going to be any more damaging to Hillary among Latinos because Drudge made this point, unless he has a huge Latino readership I didn't know about. More broadly, it seems pretty silly to use Drudge headlines as a way of gauging whether something Hillary did is politically savvy or not. He's obviously always going to put the worst spin on most things Hillary.

But hey, if the intention was to give Drudge a plug, it worked. Seelye's story has been the lead on his site all morning -- even though it's hard to find anything in it that you couldn't find in about a hundred other articles.

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