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Hillary gets surprise backing
20/04/2008 21:06 - (SA)
Beth Fouhy
Philadelphia - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton was endorsed on Sunday by a former foe who personally funded many of the investigations that led to her husband President Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998.
The unexpected nod came from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper, whose owner and publisher, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, in the 1990s helped support conservative groups and publications investigating the then-president's financial dealings and sex life.
It was one of a handful of endorsements the New York senator has received from Pennsylvania newspapers before the state's primary on Tuesday. Most of the state's major papers have endorsed Barack Obama.
In its endorsement, Tribune-Review editors said Obama was too inexperienced to be president and that his recent comments about bitter voters living in small towns showed a lack of respect for middle-class values.
"In sharp contrast, Clinton is far more experienced in government - as an engaged first lady to a governor and a president, as a second-term senator in her own right," the paper said.
Impressed with Hillary
"She has a real voting record on key issues. Agree with her or not, you at least know where she stands instead of being forced to wonder."
Clinton met with the Tribune-Review's editorial board, including Scaife, last month.
Afterwards, Scaife wrote an editorial titled "Hillary, Reassessed", declaring how impressed he had been by the former first lady.
"Her meeting and her remarks during it changed my mind about her," wrote Scaife.
Scaife spent $2.3m to fund a series of articles by The American Spectator magazine that dug into Bill Clinton's behaviour as governor of Arkansas.
The magazine reported that Clinton had asked state troopers to help procure women for him and that he had sexually harassed a state worker named Paula Jones.
Jones's legal case against Clinton helped launch an independent counsel investigation that eventually exposed his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Hillary Clinton famously defended her husband at the time, saying the allegations were part of a "vast rightwing conspiracy" heavily funded by Scaife.
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