The Wash­ing­ton Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the ori­gins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.

I should start by saying that Allen is some­thing of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doc­tor­ates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Human­i­ties Divi­sion at the U. of C. she was the uni­ver­sity offi­cer most directly respon­si­ble for Chicago Review.

Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s val­i­da­tion of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been cov­ered by him and others:

There’s some inter­est­ing stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doc­tor­ates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a mar­ginal Illi­nois char­ac­ter named Andy Martin—without even resort­ing to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsess­ing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.

This kind of turf-​guarding is fairly pre­dictable, espe­cially when it’s jour­nal­ists and aca­d­e­mics who are stand­ing on oppo­site sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)

But Smith’s self-​confessed super­cil­ious­ness seems mis­placed. For one thing, Smith sees Allen’s “key discovery” as naming the iden­tity of Andy Martin as the source of the Muslim smear. And, as I’m sure Allen would agree, it’s right and good of him to point to the pri­or­ity of Chris Hayes’s arti­cle. But I’d also bet a hun­dred bucks that for Allen, who spe­cial­izes in the pro­ce­dures and prac­tices of democ­racy, the “interesting stuff…about how a smear spreads” is what makes the smear worth studying.

It’s also a little odd that Smith would mock Allen for her Google research, since his own efforts with The Google seem not to have been so fruit­ful. In a story cowrit­ten with Jonathan Martin last Octo­ber (which Smith links to as proof that he’s been hot on the smear’s trail, and which appeared two weeks before Hayes’s arti­cle) the two Politico reporters write:

The whis­pers appear not to have sur­faced during his 2004 Senate bid.

The first clear appear­ance of the theme on the Web came in a Dec. 18, 2006, column by Debbie Schlussel…

I cer­tainly don’t want to make a fed­eral case out of this; I like Smith’s blog and check in on it almost hourly some days. But I do think it fair to point out (as Hayes and Allen show) that both of those Octo­ber state­ments are wrong. (And no, no par­tial credit for the hedg­ing “appear/clear appearance” for­mu­lae.) Does this make Smith a bad reporter? Of course not, but it does sug­gest he ought to show a little more respect for the work Allen has done.