Cal Thomas, Bob Beckel Bring 'Common Ground' to 'USA Today'

According to Editor & Publisher, USA Today is launching a new feature called "Common Ground" with Bob Beckel and Cal Thomas. What's interesting about the news item was the reference to Bob Beckel as "Liberal Democrat strategist." And E & P notes these additional qualifications:

Beckel -- who could not be reached for comment today -- is a former TMS columnist. He was also deputy assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration, and he helped manage Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign.

All of which is important only if you remember that Bob Beckel guest hosted Larry King's show for years and that CNN did not tell viewers that he was he was a Democrat operative who came from a family of Democrat activists.

From his own site:

After a political baptism as a college student in Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, a tour of duty in the Peace Corps and a successful stint heading up his own consulting firm, Bob joined the government in 1977. As the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter Administration, he steered the controversial Panama Canal Treaties through Congress. He moved to the White House to head the Administration’s effort to press Congress into passing the Mid East and SALT II Treaties.

Deploring "character assassination" in an interview with Buzzflash, Beckel applauds Buzzflash. "I see places like yours that are willing to take these a**holes on and write stories and do editorials about them that none of the mainstream press will do." He deplores character assassination but "I’ve got a guy working right now, a retired lawyer, who is going to track down where George Bush was during those months he said he was with the Air Force Reserves. This is all being done by contributions, and a chunk of that out of my own pocket." And then there is Tom DeLay. "We’re going after DeLay. We have people looking into his various money organizations. DeLay is about as forgiving as a cornered rattlesnake, and this boy needs to be cut down to size."

Beckel is also remembered for trying to persuade members of the electoral college to vote for Democrats, an action that cause two top staffers at the firm quit in protest and a good deal of embarassment for the Democrat party. Even the criminal extortion that Beckel refers to on his website is a less than honest depiction of the case, focusing as it did on how the Right used it to assault his character. Hard to do so when he was being extorted by a prostitute.

Our recollection was that Beckel was exposed in the liberal media for hiring a prostitute and then getting blackmailed to keep it quiet. The journal Campaigns & Elections described the incident this way: "Bob Beckel, manager of Walter Mondale's…1984 landslide presidential campaign loss, resigned from his consulting job…in the wake of a scandal involving a prostitute who allegedly tried to extort $50,000 from him. Beckel told Maryland's Montgomery County Police Department he had paid the Fairfax County, Virginia, woman $1,900 for sexual liaisons at his Maryland home in late June, and that days later he found a note on his car and a message on his answering machine demanding money and threatening to release evidence of the woman's visits to his family and the media…Three people from Alexandria, Fairfax County, and Washington, D.C. were arrested and charged with extortion and conspiracy to commit extortion."

The Smoking Gun has photographs and the salacious details. None of which is mentioned by USA Today or Editor & Publisher.

Nor do they link to any writing by Beckel. Like this particularly vicious article. But then Beckel specializes in advising "corporations, trade associations, and labor unions on communication strategy, consensus building, and public policy." With only a BA degree, he "served as an adjunct professor, teaching presidential politics at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland's graduate school of public affairs."

You can bet USA Today isn't going to tell you about Bob Bechel's sordid past or dispicable politics.