Hillary + Drudge ≠ Romney + Drudge

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An extraordinarily inside baseball piece in Monday’s NYT, exposing the fact that the Hillary campaign sometimes releases minor scoops to Matt Drudge. Shock horror.

The only news here is that a Democrat finally has as good a press team as the Republicans have for the past few cycles. And yet, the Dems are still less, well, shady. It’s one thing to leak something like this:

As Senator Barack Obama prepared to give a major speech on Iraq one morning a few weeks ago, a flashing red-siren alert went up on the Drudge Report Web site. It read, “Queen of the Quarter: Hillary Crushes Obama in Surprise Fund-Raising Surge,” and, “$27 Million, Sources Tell Drudge Report.” Within minutes, the Drudge site had injected Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s fund-raising success into the day’s political news on the Internet and cable television.

It’s another thing to leak something like this:

As the Bush political team dispersed among the Republican candidates this year, some of Mr. Rhoades’s former colleagues came to regret his special relationship with Mr. Drudge. …as Mr. Drudge ran a series of photographs making Mr. McCain look old and other items, like one wrongly raising the possibility that a bump he took to the head in Iraq was cancer.

Fundraising totals are, you know, news. Cancer scares are the new Kerry intern.