Daniel Halper Quote

Clinton got out there and created a new narrative on the economy, which took some of the needles out of Obama, says Republican strategist Mike Murphy. It was the biggest single number-moving event in the entire campaign. It was devastatingly important to the Obama guys. And he put him back in business. (It also helped, Murphy adds, that the Romney campaign was totally incompetent.) In 2000, Clinton had famously faulted Al Gore for not letting Clinton rally the base in key swing states. It was not a mistake Barack Obama was going to repeat. In addition to his convention speech, Clinton stumped for Obama in swing states like Florida and Ohio. Unlike Gore and his campaign team, the Obama people, despite whatever hard feelings they had, were pretty dispassionate and not afraid to let him come in and steal the show, if they thought it would be helpful, says a former Clinton official who worked in the Obama administration. Clinton even starred in a widely seen advertisement for Obama, declaring that President Obama has a plan to rebuild America from the ground up, investing in innovation, education, and job training. It only works if there is a strong middle class. That’s what happened when I was president.15

Daniel Halper

Clinton got out there and created a new narrative on the economy, which took some of the needles out of Obama, says Republican strategist Mike Murphy. It was the biggest single number-moving event in the entire campaign. It was devastatingly important to the Obama guys. And he put him back in business. (It also helped, Murphy adds, that the Romney campaign was totally incompetent.) In 2000, Clinton had famously faulted Al Gore for not letting Clinton rally the base in key swing states. It was not a mistake Barack Obama was going to repeat. In addition to his convention speech, Clinton stumped for Obama in swing states like Florida and Ohio. Unlike Gore and his campaign team, the Obama people, despite whatever hard feelings they had, were pretty dispassionate and not afraid to let him come in and steal the show, if they thought it would be helpful, says a former Clinton official who worked in the Obama administration. Clinton even starred in a widely seen advertisement for Obama, declaring that President Obama has a plan to rebuild America from the ground up, investing in innovation, education, and job training. It only works if there is a strong middle class. That’s what happened when I was president.15

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About Daniel Halper

Daniel Halper is an American political writer. He previously served as the online editor of the now-defunct neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard until a management change at that publication in 2016 and from 2016 to 2017 was employed by the New York Post. Halper authored Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (ISBN 978-0062311238), an unflattering 2014 biography of the Clinton family.
In 2017, he became an editor for the Drudge Report, replacing Joseph Curl. Halper's hiring coincided with the Drudge family's retreat from the public sphere (Drudge's father sold his own site Refdesk the same year to the same company that also took over the Report's advertising account at the same time, and by 2019 unconfirmed reports had emerged that Matt Drudge had sold the Report) and may have been a factor in the Report having a substantial change in editorial direction.
In June 2020 Halper published the book "A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein" together with Alana Goodman.