The Scoreboard is often hard-pressed to comment on an unethical story in the media without helping to publicize it, and this is one of those instances. The website NewsMax.com, which makes Fox News look like Pravda, has begun promoting an "Achilles heel" in Hillary Clinton's run for the White House: her senior thesis at Wellesley College. A few more respectable news organizations, such as the Boston Globe, also are writing about the paper, which Senator Clinton wrote in 1969. It was a favorable analysis of the philosophy, work, and life of a radical social reformer named Saul Alinsky who, if he wasn't a communist, certainly did a good imitation of one. The thesis is provoking interest now because it is finally available to the public and press after being withheld from view by the college during the Clinton administration.

The fact that the thesis was ever withheld is an ethical black mark against Wellesley, which kowtowed to a politically motivated request by the Clinton White House in 1993 to lock the 93 page thesis away, despite the fact that all other student theses are accessible. Astoundingly, the school established a transparently biased new policy: every thesis could be viewed except those of a sitting President or First Lady. Translation: Wellesley will play political favorites by keeping potentially embarrassing material about a popular alumna away from the press and her political enemies. Later on, Wellesley compounded its unethical actions by issuing a disingenuous explanation for the change, citing its uncertainty over whether copyright laws permitted a former student to block public and press access to something the student had written for academic credit.

Wellesley's phony-baloney policy doesn't apply now, so the thesis can finally be read, and NewsMax believes it can and should be used to "expose" Sen. Clinton's radical soul. Ominously, Republican political consultant Chris Lacivita, who co-produced the infamous, unfair and undeniably effective "Swift Boat" ads against John Kerry's Vietnam service, told MSNBC, "What someone did or said 35 years ago is certainly fair game, especially if you're running for president of the United States." He said also that he plans to read the thesis very soon. 

That's bound to be true, but it shouldn't be, and a Swift Boat-style attack on Clinton using such a source would be even less fair than the anti-Kerry effort. A college senior thesis is 100% irrelevant to the character or beliefs of a 60 year old public servant, no matter what it contains. Belief in leprechauns? Immaterial. Recipes for cannibals? Doesn't matter. Arguments for returning to the Stone Age? Who cares? Certitude that the Earth was created by alien toy-makers? Not worth thinking about.

Peggy Noonan, the eloquent and earnest former Reagan speechwriter, once wrote that the Wellesley thesis was the "Rosetta Stone" for those seeking the truth about the chameleon-esque Hillary. That is just plain silly. A senior thesis is not a Rorschach test or a polygraph test, and as something written for a grade, it is not even a reliable measure of what someone really thinks when it is written (does anyone doubt that Hillary Clinton, of all people, would be perfectly capable of writing a thesis tilted toward the beliefs of her professors?), much less thirty-eight years later. Ronald Reagan was a FDR liberal when he was twenty-one; FDR himself was a callowly aristocratic conservative. At twenty-one George W. Bush was a hard-drinking party boy. Going back in history a bit, we find that at twenty-one President-to-be Andrew Johnson was illiterate and Ulysses S, Grant was a drunken West Point failure. The same Republicans and conservative media types salivating for this "Rosetta Stone" were defending former Senator George Allen in October when it was revealed that he acted like a race-baiting bully in his college days. "Judge the George Allen who has been in public life, not the school boy," they argued then, correctly. It is just as valid an argument in Clinton's favor. The fact that people couldn't read Hillary Rodham's thesis while her husband was President may say something about the liberal political bias at elite Northeast institutions, but the fact that we can read it now should only interest biographers and trivia fans.

Political opponents and reporters who care about fairness---surely there must be some in these two groups that do---ought to leave Hillary's thesis alone.