On a recent sweltering Wednesday in Washington, D.C., when most of the town had cleared out for the upcoming Fourth of July weekend, Adrienne Elrod was at a desk piled high with books—among them both of Hillary Clinton’s memoirs and the 2008 campaign pot-boiler Game Change—emailing with a reporter from BuzzFeed about a small item running later that evening.
Elrod is the communications director for Correct the Record, a 6-month-old outfit founded by David Brock, the one-time conservative dirty trickster who in the 1990s turned over a new leaf and started Media Matters, which keeps a watchful eye on the latest talk radio or Fox News outrage. The new group was created to, well, correct the record, particularly the right-wing attacks on Hillary Clinton as she mulls a 2016 presidential run.
The 20 or so staff members at Correct the Record, glued to computers in a loft-like space on Massachusetts Avenue, next to Brock’s own office, were engaged that afternoon in pushing back on a narrative emerging that sales of Clinton’s latest memoir, Hard Choices, were tanking.
“If we hadn’t already seen three articles on this, before the bestseller list was even out, we wouldn’t be doing this,” said Burns Strider, a genial bear of a Mississippian. He was surrounded by Elrod, an Arkansan and former operative with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and two other aides who barely looked up from their MacBooks. On the walls around them were photos of Clinton at various periods of her career—looking regal at the State Department, shaggy with Bill in their Yale Law School days.
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