We Have a Winner

NYPress's Wimblehack, the jewel of the 2004 campaign season, names Elisabeth Bumiller its champion. A snippet:

All campaign journalists fall into the habit of writing long personality pieces about the "man-behind-the-man" figures they spend so much time with on the campaign. In the last two years there were probably 10 times more profiles of Stephanie Cutter and Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove and Karen Hughes and Joe Trippi and Chris Lehane and Ralph Reed than there were of laid-off workers, prisoners, illegal immigrants, the uninsured or any of the other mysterious categories of depressing individuals ostensibly involved in the election.

Obviously, this was a crime in itself of sorts, as the campaign press focused a lot more on the optimistic, self-justifying soap opera of the campaign itself than on the country's actual problems. The campaign press was consistently far more fascinated with the drama and the trimmings of power than it was with, say, nuclear safety, or how people who collect AFDC checks live. That's why the only time you saw a profile of a "working-class Catholic girl" was when it was Karen Tumulty writing about Mary Beth Cahill, the "miracle worker" who brought back John Kerry's campaign from the dead.

Now, if you're like me, you probably don't give a shit about the fact that Mary Beth Cahill honed her political reflexes at her working-class Boston dinner table, where she was the bossy older sister in a family with six children. But if you think that's irrelevant, try giving a shit about the inner life of the presidential tailor, Georges de Paris, whom Bumiller amazingly profiled just a week after the election, when half of the population was still trying to talk itself down from the ledge in the wake of the horrifying result.

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