You have to feel a little sorry for Robert Kaiser. Not long after being dethroned as managing editor of the Washington Post last year, Kaiser was left with a stalled career and little to do. So he set about digging into what he presumed to be the fons et origo of Hillary Clinton's fabled "vast right-wing conspiracy." That would be Richard Mellon Scaife, the conservative philanthropist who has funded hundreds of conservative projects over the last 25 years.
Scribblers from every major paper in America have broken their little pencils trying to expose Scaife's life story and to locate there the focus of evil in modern American life. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post (more than once!) -- you name the news organization, it's done a Scaife hit piece. And the result of all this expense of time and money has been unvarying: Richard Mellon Scaife is a -- are you ready? -- a conservative philanthropist who has funded hundreds of conservative projects over the last 25 years!
We could have told Bob Kaiser that the same thing would happen to him -- lots of time (his) and money (the Post's) wasted, all to inform his readers that Richard Mellon Scaife is a conservative philanthropist who has funded hundreds of . . . well, you know. In public, Kaiser actually wears his Phi Beta Kappa pin on his lapel -- really, he does; THE SCRAPBOOK wouldn't dare make something like that up. So you'd think, while he might be a vain fellow, surely he's at least a smart one. You'd never know it, though, from the wandering, blandly written story that Kaiser and the Post dumped on their readers last week.
The thing came in two very long installments -- 14,000 words in search of a point. In it we learned that Dick Scaife seldom speaks in meetings, is not particularly bookish, and has endured a complicated personal life (oh! the things we could tell you about the complicated personal lives of some Post editors we know!). Also he used to drink too much, went to Yale, and protects his privacy from people like Bob Kaiser. All this we learned, and yet more: Did you know, for example, that Richard Mellon Scaife is a conservative philanthropist who has funded hundreds of conservative projects over the last 25 years? It said so, right there in the Post.
Kaiser's story, in other words, was a quite conspicuous flop. So why did the Post choose to run it? The Post is a far better paper than it was ten years ago, having wrung itself dry of the paranoid anti-conservatism that marred it in the 1970s and '80s. Perhaps Kaiser's piece was one last indulgence in the paper's weird old obsession. And it's probably hard, even for the bosses, to tell their former managing editor, after a year of hard labor, that he's come up with a dud. But next time Kaiser sets out on one of his "in-depth exposes," somebody should warn him that he's in danger of exposing only himself.