McClatchy reporter gives Clinton’s the “R” treatment

McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington correspondent Matt Stearns has been treating the Clintons the way most MSM reporters treat the Rs.

But Stearns has to know the Clintons aren’t Republicans. Yet look at the way he’s treating them.

From a Feb. 3 report:

To hear Hillary Clinton talk, she's spent her entire career putting her Yale Law School degree to work for the common good.

She routinely tells voters that she's "been working to bring positive change to people's lives for 35 years." She told a voter in New Hampshire: "I've spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector." Speaking in South Carolina, Bill Clinton said his wife "could have taken a job with a firm ... Instead she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children's Defense Fund."

The overall portrait is of a lifelong, selfless do-gooder. The whole story is more complicated — and less flattering.

Clinton worked at the Children's Defense Fund for less than a year, and that's the only full-time job in the nonprofit sector she's ever had. She also worked briefly as a law professor.

Clinton spent the bulk of her career — 15 of those 35 years — at one of Arkansas' most prestigious corporate law firms, where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards.

Neither she nor her surrogates, however, ever mention that on the campaign trail.

Her campaign Web site biography devotes six paragraphs to her pro bono legal work for the poor but sums up the bulk of her experience in one sentence: "She also continued her legal career as a partner in a law firm."

There’s more. You can read it all here.

And look at how Stearns treated former President Clinton in a story which ran Jan. 23 in the McClatchy owned Raleigh News & Observer [excerpts]:

Bill Clinton finally had a good day Tuesday: His only mistake was the color of his tie.

Campaigning in University of South Carolina country, Clinton sported a Clemson-orange tie instead of Gamecocks garnet.

"I left all my red ties at home," Clinton apologized to Russell Pardee, a voter who called Clinton on it at a Columbia diner.

Given the criticism recently piled on the former president as he became wife Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief attack dog against Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama, a tie gaffe is nothing. It's been so bad that influential African-American Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., warned him to "chill." …

"He used to be my boyfriend, but I have no respect for him for the remarks that he's been making," said Bennie Bayard, 60, a black retiree from Greenville who attended an Obama rally. …

Clinton did distort a few things on Tuesday -- but to his and his wife's benefit, not at her opponents' expense.

He continued the mythology that the campaign has built around Hillary Clinton's legal career: "She could have taken a job with a firm . . . instead she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children's Defense Fund."

In fact, Hillary Clinton worked less than two years at the Children's Defense Fund. She spent the bulk of her career -- 15-plus years -- as a corporate lawyer at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark.

Clinton boasted about his hybrid "Mercury mini-SUV that gets 39 miles to the gallon," even as he regularly circles the globe by private jet and in motorcades featuring full-size, gas-guzzling SUVs.

And he was as full of contradictions as ever. Hours after criticizing reporters in Columbia for focusing on the "spat" between Obama and Hillary Clinton at the Monday debate, Clinton told voters in Greenville: "I kind of liked seeing Barack and Hillary fight last night. They're real people. Neither one of them is supposed to be this wind-up doll who's supposed to behave a certain way. ... I like this. I think it's exciting." …

Clinton's infamous temper flashed briefly when a Greenville voter asked if Clinton felt he was standing in Obama's way as the Illinois senator tries to become the first black president.

"I'm not standing in his way," Clinton snapped. "Nobody has a right to be president."

But Clinton quickly chilled out. …

Here’s the entire N&O story.

The former President's an “attack dog” with an “infamous temper?” Hillary's a self-promoting corporate lawyer who’s tried to cover that up?

That’s usually not what we’ve been told about the Clintons.

Until recently we mostly heard Bill Clinton “rocked.” He was “very popular in contrast to Bush” and Hillary’s “greatest asset.”

And Hillary? We heard a lot about how she cared so much for children she even wrote a book telling us how to raise them: It Takes a Whole Village.

Remember?

I don’t know whether McClatchy’s Stearns is one of many in MSM who’ve swooned for Sen. Obama and are angry at the Clintons for their opposition to him.

It could be Stearns is a reporter who simply tells it like he sees it.

I’ll be watching for his byline and reading his reports as the campaign unfolds.