Clinton-Murdoch tie baffles liberals

Published Saturday, May 13, 2006

NEW YORK (AP) - Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News Channel and other conservative news outlets have been skewering Hillary Rodham Clinton for years, will host a summer fundraiser for the senator, mystifying some observers and enraging others.

Especially incensed are liberal activists, who for months have decried they what see as a shift to the right on Clinton’s part as the Democrat contemplates a run for president in 2008. They are stunned she is associating with a man viewed as a cornerstone of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," the term Clinton herself coined.

"Hillary, help us. Who the hell are you?" Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen thundered.

Liberal blogger David Sirota complained: "The brazenness of this move is almost too much to stomach."

Neither Clinton or Murdoch have had much to say about the fundraiser since it was first reported this week by The Financial Times.

"I think this is about New York. It’s about the kind of job that I’m doing as a senator from New York," Clinton said yesterday.

Murdoch, for his part, dismissed the event as "no big deal."

"We think that she has been effective on state issues and local issues here in New York," Murdoch said on a News Corp. earnings call.

The Clinton-Murdoch alliance is not entirely new. The two have been moving toward a detente since 2000, when she won her Senate seat after a campaign that included a series of not-so-flattering Clinton headlines in another Murdoch property, the New York Post.

Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said the arrangement suits Clinton and Murdoch equally well. "She’s reaching out to a guy who’s on the right side of the spectrum, and she needs some friends there," she said.

And Murdoch?

"That’s simple - Hillary’s going to run for president, and she might win," Carroll said.