A New York Times article on Hillary’s relationship with Matt Drudge highlights the unbelievable lengths to which parties and campaigns now go in courting his favor:

On the Republican side, a generation of campaign consultants has grown up learning to play in Mr. Drudge’s influential but rarefied world. They have spent years studying his tastes and moods while carefully building close relationships with him that are now benefiting some Republican presidential campaigns — and that others are scrambling to match.

The early advantage on their side, in the view of several Republicans, seems to have gone to Mitt Romney, who hired the former Bush political aide who had been the central party’s prime point of contact with Mr. Drudge, Matthew Rhoades. His status was solidified after the 2004 election at a steakhouse dinner in Miami with Mr. Drudge, who for all his renown in politics is a somewhat spectral presence who rarely agrees to meet with political operatives or journalists and who did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.

So important was the Romney camp’s perceived advantage in the eyes of aides to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, that at one point this year they even considered sending an emissary to Miami to build their own relationship with him, two former McCain campaign officials said. (Mr. Drudge ignored the invitation, one of the officials said.)

But, typical of a campaign with a reputation for exploiting every advantage and trying to neutralize every disadvantage, Mrs. Clinton’s communications team, led by Howard Wolfson, is not leaving Mr. Drudge to the Republicans. Five current and former Democratic officials said Mrs. Clinton has on her side the closest thing her party has ever had to Mr. Rhoades in Tracy Sefl, a former Democratic National Committee official, who has established a friendly working relationship with Mr. Drudge — and through whom Mrs. Clinton’s campaign often worked quietly to open a line of communication.

That effort has helped to mix some positive stories in with the negative fare about Mrs. Clinton that Mr. Drudge still serves up regularly, they said, though Ms. Sefl’s fingerprints are usually impossible to spot.

…”It seems to me that after the 2004 election, the Democrats realized the impact that the Drudge Report has, and made it a priority,” said Jim Dyke, a strategist for Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign and the communications director for the Republican National Committee in 2004.

The Democrats have come to believe, Mr. Dyke said, what Republicans have always thought: “No single person is more relevant to shaping the media environment in a political campaign.”

Few are willing to attach their names to any specific statements about Mr. Drudge or descriptions of their strategies in dealing with him, fearing that they might alienate him.

Former Republican Party and Bush campaign officials said that in 2004 they considered Mr. Drudge’s site so central in their efforts to undermine Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign that they systemized their approach to him.

Senior aides in the Bush war room, run by Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican communications aide, insisted on vetting any information to be fed to Mr. Drudge so as not to annoy and overwhelm him with items he might find unworthy. And, these officials said, when the approval was given, the main point of contact was usually the Bush aide who was closest to Mr. Drudge, J. Timothy Griffin, now a consultant to the campaign of Fred D. Thompson, the former Republican senator from Tennessee.

Through that system, Mr. Bush’s aides funneled embarrassing tidbits about Mr. Kerry in which mainstream news reporters had initially shown less interest. From time to time, those former aides said, an item’s appearance on Drudge would drive it into mainstream news coverage: A video clip of Mr. Kerry contradicting himself, or a photograph of him wearing a protective germ outfit.

“It’s the stuff that speaks to the absurdity of politics, and it’s done with devastating effect,” a former Bush campaign aide said.

But, several strategists said, nothing is automatic with Mr. Drudge, whose tastes can be unpredictable, making a personal connection to him all the more valuable. Those who know him best say it takes special courting to build a real relationship.

Before Mr. Griffin left politics to work as a military lawyer in 2005, he had a dinner with Mr. Drudge and Mr. Rhoades to solidify Mr. Rhoades’s new place as the main Drudge Report contact for the central party. That dinner was first reported in the book “The Way to Win,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, published last year.

As the Bush political team dispersed among the Republican candidates this year, some of Mr. Rhoades’s former colleagues came to regret his special relationship with Mr. Drudge. Former aides to Mr. McCain said in interviews that they had cursed Mr. Rhoades’s name daily this year as Mr. Drudge ran a series of photographs making Mr. McCain look old and other items, like one wrongly raising the possibility that a bump he took to the head in Iraq was cancer.

Democrats have long known how the McCain campaign felt. And it is precisely why, a strategist close to the Clinton campaign said, her aides had decided to use the site more aggressively and capitalize on the line to him established by Ms. Sefl — now a vice president at the Glover Park Group, the former firm of Mr. Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, and an informal adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe. Ms. Sefl had no comment.