Brock called for more thoughtful discourse in the face of 'slander sites.' | John Shinkle/POLITICO Brock blasts 'political smutmongers'

Media Matters founder David Brock on Tuesday urged the end of “political smutmongers” and blasted the “right wing’s 20-year obsession with the Clintons,” singling out Sen. Rand Paul, as he described evolving from being one of the couple’s main antagonists to one of their fiercest defenders.

Brock spoke in Little Rock, Arkansas, the one-time home state of the ex-president and former secretary of state. His speech came as Hillary Clinton is considering a second run for the White House in 2016, and in it he skewered one of her potential GOP rivals, Paul of Kentucky.


“Call off the political smutmongers,” he said, according to a prepared copy of the speech released by his team. “…Give the American people the presidential campaign they deserve, one based on real issues and on the public record. Ask —‘is it relevant to someone’s performance in public office?’ —before attacking.”

( Also on POLITICO: Brock muses on his Clinton evolution)

Brock’s Media Matters is well-known for its scrutiny of conservative news organizations, especially Fox News. He also is behind the super PAC American Bridge and an affiliated rapid-response initiative, Correct the Record, which has frequently gone to bat for Hillary Clinton on social media.

Brock, 51, called for more thoughtful political discourse in the face of “slander sites,” according to the prepared remarks, to which his aides said he largely adhered.

He blasted Paul as “the poster boy” for employing a “retro strategy.” The Kentucky senator, who has said he is heavily weighing a 2016 presidential bid, has charged on many occasions that the Democratic Party’s cries of a Republican “war on women” don’t take into account the Monica Lewinsky scandal that roiled Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s.

“Those who want to throw stones ought to be very careful about setting the rules of the game in such a way that a candidate is responsible for the behavior of those closest to them,” Brock said. He pointed to the “secessionist rantings of a former [Rand Paul] top aide” and charging that the first-term senator “should answer for the anti-Semitic and racist material published by a newsletter” tied to his father, libertarian icon and former congressman Ron Paul.

Brock began the speech by detailing his conversion from a conservative journalist with a dim view of the Clintons, to his position now as one of their most vocal champions. His team is part of an early constellation of groups gearing up for a possible Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign.

“At its root, I realized, Clinton-hating had nothing to do with what the Clintons did or did not do,” he said. “It had everything to do with fear of the change they represented on the one hand, and on the other, a newly brutal form of partisan power politics. Those same reactionary forces are still at work today, abetted at times by the mainstream.”

Brock charged that at a time when “virtually every major news outlet has assigned a reporter to the Hillary Clinton beat” at this early stage, “the media turns around and blames Mrs. Clinton for being over-exposed.”

The conservative media—of which he was once a part—is now home to the “Orwellian” Fox News and “billionaires and shock-jocks who realized that they could use fear and sensationalism to undermine honest debate and buttress their bottom lines.

“Like the conservatives who once savaged Bill Clinton personally, the conservatives of today have no program to offer the vast majority of Americans,” he said. “So we see them running scared, and once again, cultivating a culture of Clinton hatred, in Hillary’s case — as you can see — with a heavy dose of misogyny.”

In the 1990s, Brock unveiled the so-called “Troopergate” scandal, involving a woman named Paula Jones who alleged harassment against then-Gov. Bill Clinton. In the speech, he said that he was “tipped” to the story by state troopers who “wanted to go public with stories scandalizing Bill and Hillary Clinton.”

“Getting to know the troopers and their handlers exposed me for the first time to the reality of Clinton-hating, which I could see had its origins in Arkansas among racists who resented Bill Clinton’s early embrace of civil rights,” he said in the text. “The anti-Clinton animus deepened when Hillary Rodham, an accomplished professional woman, came on the scene.”

Brock described himself as someone who found conservatism in college, “attracted to the ideals of Ronald Reagan.” But as he embarked on a book commissioned as “a political hit-job” on Clinton, Brock said he began to see what her “admirers saw in her, what we all see in her today: a steadfast commitment to public service and a deep desire to affirm the good and virtuous in politics all too rarely seen in her generation of politicians.”