Ver-r-r-r-y interesting profile of Anita Dunn, the Fox-bashing White House communications czarina, in The Washington Post today. The WaPo's Jason Horowitz goes through all the usual de rigeur background stuff, which is the usual grist for "Style" section profiles.
But then Horowitz tells this interesting tale, obviously mostly provided by Blair Hull, a Chicago fatcat who back in 2002 hired Dunn to run his enormously expensive--$28 million, just for the Democratic primary--but failed Senate campaign. Poor Mr. Hull. It seems that bad information about him came out, thus demolishing his campaign, allowing Barack Obama to win the Democratic nomination in 2004.
And then Ms. Dunn went to work for Barack Obama. And Mr. Hull doesn't seem to see a connection there, or anything curious about the sequence of events. Well, here it is, and to me, at least, it's curious: Hull hires Dunn to help him against Obama. Hull loses to Obama. Dunn goes to work for Obama.
Does it really take Philip Marlowe to figure this one out? But hey, if Hull doesn't mind, I don't mind. Certainly Dunn doesn't mind.
Here's the good stuff:
But Dunn was against Obama before she was for him. Back in 2002, Blair Hull, an unknown but wealthy former securities trader in Chicago, scored a coup just by hiring Dunn, a nationally recognized operative, to be the media consultant on his wild-card bid for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. Hull said that, in the formative days of the Illinois primary, he disclosed to his campaign adviser some unseemly and potentially damaging details of his bitter 1998 divorce from Brenda Sexton.
"Her advice was not to make it public," Hull, who now runs Matlock Capital, an investment company based in Chicago, said of Dunn.
Hull took the advice, among that of other consultants, and ultimately spent $28 million, with Dunn directing the campaign's message and communications. She also, according to Hull, "spent a significant amount of time" on the phone and in "private meetings" with the candidate's ex-wife to develop an "appropriate response" should an embarrassing 1998 police report come to light.
"I thought Anita was a smart, talented woman and I was impressed by her professionalism," said Sexton, recalling that Dunn reached out to her and set in motion a plan in which Sexton agreed to express support for her ex-husband and acknowledge a contentious divorce as ancient history.
But as the March primary neared, rumors percolated that something terrible lurked in Hull's sealed divorce papers. Only about three weeks before election day, the documents were unsealed and the Chicago newspapers pounced, revealing Hull's verbal and physical abuse of his wife. At first, everyone stuck to the "contentious divorce" script, but with the scandal chipping away at his lead, Hull soon denigrated Sexton herself -- in debates, through surrogates, in television ads -- as a gold digger. The simple statement Dunn had coached Sexton to recite was no longer operable.
"She did not deal with that issue very well," said Hull, referring to Dunn's approach to the problems with his ex-wife. "She should have brought it out initially. But then her year-and-a-half of work wouldn't have happened. Why not get paid until the finish line?
Hull's candidacy sank, allowing state Sen. Barack Obama to come from behind in the polls and win the nomination. In the general election Obama faced Jack Ryan, who dropped out late in the race when his own unsealed divorce papers revealed that he had tried to force his then-wife to perform public intercourse in sex clubs.
A few years later, in 2006, Hull said, he was not surprised to see Dunn show up as a consultant on Obama's leadership PAC, Hopefund.
