Tim Russert, Katie Couric or Larry King eventually may deliver telling blows of their own, but score Round 1 in the contest to extract the most provocative presidential campaign quotes to . . . Mayhill Fowler?
The 61-year-old self-described "failed writer" and amateur Web journalist helped create two of the most unexpected moments in the 2008 election -- most recently on Monday, when she recorded former President Clinton's fiery denunciation ("slimy," "dishonest") of Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum.
That scoop came six weeks after Fowler rocked the Democratic race for president by reporting (from a "closed press" fundraiser in San Francisco) Barack Obama's now infamous discussion of "bitter" small-town Americans who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."
The latest incident cemented Fowler's place as the unlikely face of the new-media revolution that is remaking presidential campaigns. Online videos can dominate the evening news. Or an unpublished novelist "with absolutely no journalism training" can alter the national debate.
In her first public remarks on Clinton's outburst, Fowler attributed her success to persistence, serendipity and an acknowledged flouting of the old rules of mainstream journalism.
"Of course he had no idea I was a journalist," Fowler said by phone from her Oakland home, recalling her close encounter with Clinton for "Off the Bus," a citizen journalism project hosted by the Huffington Post website. "He just thought we were all average, ordinary Americans who had come out to see him. And, of course, in one sense, that is what I am."
Fowler said she felt empathy for Clinton before and after he shattered the "elegiac" final hours of Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign with his agitated statements.
"He is exhausted. It's the end of the road. He realizes it might be his last day campaigning," Fowler said in explaining Clinton's three-minute eruption. "He does not have the impulse control he once had. And, at that time at least, he still could not understand or appreciate why Barack Obama is so popular."
The Clinton swing through South Dakota began like many others for Fowler -- with long days scrambling after the candidate and prolonged nights filing dispatches "in my pajamas and pashmina in the business center of some Hilton Garden Inn."
She was on hand when he addressed hundreds of voters in Milbank, waxing about what he said "may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind."
