When President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Irish President Mary Robinson yesterday afternoon, it marked an anticlimactic end to what seemed to be a mushrooming controversy. The Medal of Freedom ceremony is usually a low-key affair, and the last time there was much drama to the proceedings was in 2004, when George W. Bush gave the Medal to three much-maligned architects of the Iraq war (George Tenet, L. Paul Bremer, and Tommy Franks). Although Bush awarded the Medal to other contentious figures, such as neoconservative firebrands Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Natan Sharansky, these moves did not attract much scrutiny. Given the Bush administration’s other failings, its dubious choice of honorees was fairly far down on most liberals’ list of complaints.

So the Obama administration was by all indications startled when its choice of Robinson triggered a fierce reaction in the neoconservative precincts of the blogosphere. The neocons’ chief grievance against Robinson was her stint as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, during which she presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism — aka the Durban Conference. Critics charged, not unjustly, that the conference spent a disproportionate amount of time condemning Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians at the expense of discussing racism in general. Draft text for the conference included prolonged attacks on Israeli racism, in ways that some found uncomfortably close to the 1975 U.N. General Assembly resolution proclaiming that “Zionism is a form of racism”. But as Robinson’s defenders were quick to point out, it is difficult to argue that Robinson herself was responsible for the anti-Israel bent of the conference. On the contrary, by all accounts she worked to strike the criticisms of Israel from the draft text, and the offending language was indeed removed from the final version.

Still, her very association with Durban, along with other criticism she made of Israeli policies, was more than enough provocation for neoconservative bloggers. (Strangely, these bloggers paid no attention to fellow medal recipient Desmond Tutu, who had also become a target of pro-Israel hardliners for his statements on behalf of Palestinian rights. Most likely Robinson’s critics realized that attacking the widely-revered Tutu was bound to be a losing battle.) Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin kicked off the anti-Robinson campaign soon after the medal announcement, with a July 30 post declaring that “[t]here are no words to describe how atrocious a selection this is.” The attacks were soon picked up by other right-wing bloggers, and within days they had spread to the opinion pages of mainstream media outlets. Prominent “Israel lobby” organizations like AIPAC and the ADL also waded into the fray, while various Israeli human rights groups lined up to defend Robinson. The day before the medal ceremony, 45 congressional Republicans sent a letter to Obama urging him to reconsider the pick.

Most outside observers were as baffled by the uproar as the administration seems to have been. M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum expressed surprise that AIPAC and the ADL bothered to get involved, noting how little the award had to do with the pro-Israel lobby’s legitimate interests. “They had as much standing to protest a White House award to an Irish President as they have to protest a Heisman for best college quarterback,” he quipped to me.

But the anti-Robinson crusade was reminiscent of the recent and similar crusade — this one ultimately successful — against retired Ambassador Chas Freeman. Freeman, a highly-regarded former diplomat with a decades-long career in the foreign service and Defense Department, withdrew from consideration for a top intelligence post in March after a similar media campaign against him, prompted first and foremost by his criticisms of Israel. The campaign against Robinson bore all the hallmarks of the one against Freeman, beginning on neoconservative blogs before spreading to newspaper op-ed pages, hawkish pro-Israel organizations, and ultimately Congress. This time, however, the neocons were unable to replicate their success in the Freeman affair. How to explain the divergent outcomes? Here are a few reasons:

Bipartisan support. With Republicans out of power, any attack of this sort needs to peel off Democrats to be successful. Freeman’s antagonists won the support of prominent Democratic Israel hawks like Senator Chuck Schumer, as well as (according to some reports) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Robinson’s attackers, on the other hand, could only stir up complaints from Reps. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) and Eliot Engel (D-NY), two Democrats whose views on Israel are so hardline as to make them outliers even by the standards of Congress. Similarly, the anti-Freeman campaign gained bipartisan coverage in the media from prominent liberal hawks like The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, while the attacks on Robinson never really migrated beyond the neoconservative right. When John Bolton is your most prominent media spokesman, it’s never a good augur of mainstream success.

Public exposure. Freeman was known in Washington foreign policy circles, but was an unfamiliar name to most reporters and pundits. This made him susceptible to all manner of dark insinuations about his record and character (Freeman has improper financial ties to the Saudis, Freeman supports the Tiananmen Square massacre, Freeman hates Jews, and so on). Each time a new allegation was disproven, another would spring up to replace it, creating the steady drip of new “revelations” that are so damaging in a scandal environment. Robinson, on the other hand, has been a well-known public figure for nearly two decades. All criticisms of her were thoroughly aired prior to the medal controversy, so there was little in the way of new allegations to feed the media uproar.

Stakes. The Medal of Freedom is a purely symbolic award, and even Robinson’s fiercest critics could hardly argue that the award would affect U.S. or Israeli interests in any concrete way. By contrast, even if most pundits had never before heard of the position of National Intelligence Council (NIC) chairman, to which Freeman was appointed, they soon learned that the its responsibilities include producing the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) that have been so critical in recent debates over Iraq and Iran policy. Iran hawks feared that NIEs under Freeman would not be sufficiently alarmist to justify a hard line against Tehran, which gave them every reason to pull out all the stops to sink his appointment. Similarly, the Medal of Freedom was a done deal once awarded, whereas Freeman’s appointment required that he actually be able to serve as an effective policymaker going forward. It was because of concerns that the campaign against him would used to discredit any intelligence coming out of the NIC that Freeman ultimately withdrew his appointment.

The Freeman affair itself. The vitriol and personal attacks directed at Freeman triggered a backlash that itself diminished the likelihood of a repeat. A number of prominent foreign service and intelligence officers stepped forward to defend him against the perceived smear campaign, and many commentators not known for being anti-Israel radicals — from James Fallows to Joe Klein to Andrew Sullivan to David Rothkopf – expressed disgust at the treatment he received. I suspect that this unexpected backlash is a major part of the reason that we have not seen many “liberal hawk” pundits providing bipartisan cover for the neocons during the Robinson controversy.

With the Robinson affair over, the neoconservative blogosphere can return to more productive uses of its time — drumming up support for war on Iran, for instance. Still, it seems unlikely that the failure of the anti-Robinson campaign will deter them in the future, and we can probably expect another ginned-up controversy in the near future.