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.