If John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, or Mitt Romney were caught spoon-feeding anti-Hillary stories to the MSM, the overwhelming cry of “swiftboating!” would echo from coast to coast.

So, what will the reaction be now that Barack Obama has been caught doing just such a thing? Here are some excerpts From Marc Ambinder’s latest Atlantic article (sub. req’d.) on the Obama tactics, along with some details of Hillary’s new partnership with Matt Drudge:

The Clinton campaign has also used Drudge to go on offense. In one example, an aide confirmed that the campaign sent Drudge a link to a story in which Michelle Obama seemed to take a swipe at Hillary Clinton over Bill’s infidelity. The story was presented—from Clinton to Drudge to the public—in a manner that was badly out of context, with a link to an exclusive videotape of Michelle Obama’s comment. But it nevertheless dominated the news cycle for 24 hours.

And…

In June, Obama’s staff slipped reporters a memorandum about the Clintons’ financial ties to Indian American entrepreneurs who benefited from job outsourcing—an act well within the norm of political conduct, though the memo did have a rather tasteless title (“Hillary Clinton, D-Punjab”). A Clinton aide caught wind of it and, no doubt inspired by Obama’s call for better conduct, persuaded a reporter for a Capitol Hill newspaper to disclose its source. Obama was forced to apologize.
But he pointedly did not pledge to refrain from disseminating such information about his opponent. Belatedly, his campaign has learned to fight back. In August, Obama’s team scored a significant hit by helping to place a story in several newspapers revealing that Norman Hsu, a major Clinton donor, had skipped town after having pleaded no contest to a charge of grand theft 15 years earlier and still faced an outstanding warrant. Hsu fled once more (he was captured in Colorado in September) and ignited a costly media frenzy for Clinton, who decided to return $850,000 in donations that he had arranged for her. (Hsu had also contributed to Obama.)

And this one takes the cake…

His campaign staffers, too, have become frustrated by the focus of the media’s attention, specifically that the press has not covered Clinton in the way they expected it would. During an interview this summer, Obama’s friend Valerie Jarrett said to me, unbidden, “He is a man who is devoted to his wife. There aren’t going to be any skeletons in his closet in terms of his personal life at all. Period.” And at a campaign event in Iowa, one of Obama’s aides plopped down next to me and spoke even more bluntly. He wanted to know when reporters would begin to look into Bill Clinton’s postpresidential sex life.

Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times asked the Obama campaign about these allegations (along with Marc Ambinder’s response):

Asked for comment on whether the campaign had a hand in “helping to place” the Hsu story, Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said “We had no knowledge of Norman Hsu’s past criminal activity, fugitive status or potential straw donor scheme until reading it in the newspaper.”
Regarding the unidentified aide wondering about Bill Clinton, LaBolt said, “In no way, shape, or form would anyone who would say such a thing be representing our campaign.”
Ambinder, told of the Obama campaign comment said, “I stand by my reporting and the article speaks for itself.”