On the eve of today’s Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, conservative patron and publisher Richard Mellon Scaife did an historic turnabout on New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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On Sunday, Scaife’s newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, endorsed Clinton, saying that Clinton had demonstrated political courage, while Obama had not. If that wasn’t strange enough, Clinton’s campaign put out a release touting the endorsement.
For those who may have forgotten, this is the same Scaife who used the Tribune-Review in the 1990s to try to prove that Clinton killed White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr., who committed suicide in 1993.
Scaife has repeatedly called Foster’s death “the Rosetta stone to the Clinton administration” (a reference to the stone found in Egypt that allowed scholars to decipher ancient hieroglyphics), the Washington Post wrote in 1999.
Scaife also gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to unearth dirt on former President Bill Clinton and supported other conservative groups that pilloried his administration. After hiring private investigators, the magazine reported that Clinton had asked state troopers to help procure women for him and that he had sexually harassed a state worker named Paula Jones. Jones’s legal case against Clinton helped launch an independent counsel investigation that eventually exposed his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
At the time, First Lady Clinton railed against “a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president,” and identified Scaife as its benefactor.
Beyond that, Slate’s Tim Noah describes Scaife as “a raging misogynist. “In 1981, Noah recounts, Scaife called a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review a “fucking Communist cunt”; more recently, he had his wife arrested and jailed for trespassing when she sought to confront him over his extramarital affair with a woman twice arrested for prostitution.
All of which is to say that the Tribune-Review’s endorsement appears a bit suspect – notwithstanding that Scaife telegraphed a change of heart last month after Clinton sat down with him and the paper’s editorial board.
Afterward, in an editorial headlined, Hillary, Reassessed, Scaife declared that her courage in attending the meeting “changed my mind about her.”
Perhaps. But perhaps the patron of conservative causes is simply pushing Clinton because he believes that she would be easier to defeat in the fall than Barack Obama.
The Tribune-Review is the largest newspaper in Pennsylvania to have endorsed Clinton. The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Scranton Times Tribune and the Morning Call of Allentown all endorsed Obama.