February 16, 2004 - Back in 1999 Tammy Phillips, an owner of a Carrollton, Texas fitness spa and former Playboy lingerie model, spun a torrid tale of her red panties and Texas Governor George W. Bush for the National Enquirer. Though many details of the story checked out the tabloid pronounced the story false while, of course, spinning out its lurid details. The story died and the lady in question sued the Enquirer for breaking what she claimed was an agreement to hold the story until she released it for publication.

On February 15, 2004 Matt Drudge “revealed” a rumor he claimed was making the rounds of Washington insiders that John Kerry had an “intern problem” quoting Wesley Clark and referring to a mysterious woman who had worked for AP and had “fled” to Africa at Kerry’s urging. As if on cue Rush Limbaugh piled on, regaling his readers with promises to pillory Senator Kerry if he had the nerve to deny the Drudge peddled rumor. Rupert Murdock’s Sun tabloid ran with it in the U.K. identifying the mystery intern as Alex Polier and quoting her parents.

The Sun claimed that Kerry had “pursued” her and that her father called the Senator a “sleezeball”. Buried in the story was the detail that the claimed “pursuit” was an offer of a job with the Senator’s re-election campaign in 1997 – the year Ms. Polier graduated from Clark University in Wooster, Massachusetts. Internet political discussion sites bubbled with right wing posters treating the tale as though it was proven and predicting that George Bush would triumph in November as a result of Kerry’s supposed peccadilloes.

Despite the valiant efforts of Rush to pin the rumor mongering on Democrats – any Democrat – the timing of the Drudge story and the Rush-Murdock follow up came at a too convenient time for the Bush re-election campaign. It was a welcome diversion from what veteran Whitehouse reporter Helen Thomas was pursuing – the strange coincidence in time between the missing 5 months of young George W. Bush’s National Guard career and the rumored public service work the fortunate son is said to have been diverted to following a 1972 cocaine arrest. Helen was simply giving Scott McClellan apoplexy with her persistent questioning at the last Whitehouse Press Gaggle.

Far from fleeing to Africa Ms. Polier was visiting her fiancé’s parents in Kenya. Unlike the Bush-Phillips tale in which the “lady in question” was the source of the story, Ms. Polier has categorically denied the Drudge-Rush-Murdock excursion into the sewer of American politics. Her supposedly irate parents have praised Senator Kerry’s handling of the rumor and announced that the Democrat has their votes for President.

It is too much to hope that the story will die here. Political smears such as this one tend to have a life of their own that grows without any regard for the facts. Details have a way of being embroidered onto the whole cloth of the rumor as the ravenous rabid right retells and retells the discredited story adding juicy bits to each retelling. It never seems to give the right pause that President Clinton was elected in the wake of the Enquirer’s Gennifer Flowers exposé and re-elected despite Drudge breaking the original “intern problem”.

It might give them pause however to remember that the press usually plays both sides of this kind of story evenly and subjects both sides of the aisle to intense scrutiny – scrutiny the President’s team seems eager to avoid. When Drudge opened this box he missed the label that Karl Rove will have to recognize – Property of Pandora.