After last week's WEEKLY STANDARD cover story on Sidney Blumenthal, " Hillary Clinton's Brain," the word around the White House was that Blumenthal had switched from working on the scandal defense team to a new task -- helping to convince the American people to back President Clinton's Iraq policy. Yes, Blumenthal was one of the White House officials responsible for concocting the Clinton/CNN "town hall" fiasco in Columbus, Ohio. We're not making this up. The idea, of course, was to show American unity.
This has been a favorite theme of Blumenthal's, according to a White House official who is "not an enemy" of Sid's. During the last presidential campaign, apparently, while Blumenthal was "technically" still working at the New Yorker, he was also pushing his "One America" idea to the first lady and Dick Morris. Indeed, Blumenthal reportedly helped infuse this "idea" into Hillary Clinton's speech to the 1996 Democratic convention and the president's 1997 State of the Union address.