Amateur Campaign Blogger Scoops the Pros

An earnest, chatty woman who often engages people even at the grocery checkout, she spends countless hours talking to people at Obama events. She refuses to read her postings online, in part because she doesn't like the way editors sometimes change her lead sentence "because they want people to click on it."

In April, Fowler asked a friend who raises money for Obama if she could attend a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco. "I've given the max to the campaign," she reminded the friend.

Fowler had her tape recorder going when the candidate made his ill-fated remarks about frustrated small-town residents turning to guns, God or anti-immigrant sentiments. The woman who had viewed Obama as a unifier was taken aback.

"I thought, he really doesn't understand these people, and he's confirming the worst stereotype this audience has of these people, and that's something I've been fighting against since I moved to California in 1968."

When Fowler quickly posted some other Obama remarks, about what he wanted in a running mate, her fundraising friend called and scolded her. But Fowler was still wrestling with the "bitter" comments. She played the tape for her husband, Jim, who didn't think it was a big deal. But Fowler says she knew it would be "devastating" to Obama.

When Michel, her supervisor, called to ask what else was on the tape, Fowler said there was more newsworthy audio but that she was not going to provide it. They fell into an hour-long discussion about the nature of journalism.

"It's ultimately your decision," Michel recalls saying. "But if you decide not to share it, and you make the decision only to publish what you believe favors Barack Obama, you put me in an impossible position as an editor."

On a flight the next day, "at 32,000 feet, the piece just appeared in my head," Fowler says. But she decided not to submit it for two more days, figuring that if the story appeared in the Huffington Post on Friday it would be "buried" over the weekend -- a common tactic for politicians trying to minimize unfavorable news.

Instead, she found herself "in the center of a hurricane." By the next morning, "I had an e-mail box full of hate mail, and hate messages on my home phone. . . . There were some crazy people. They were just afraid that I had cooked the Obama goose."

That was just the beginning. Local television crews camped out on her block. Cable news bookers, she says, were "like a pack of rabid dogs that really just wanted a piece of me to fill a little time slot." Fowler's daughter, a college student also named Mayhill Fowler, was also flooded with nasty e-mail. It was a difficult moment for Fowler, and she briefly wrestled with dark thoughts. Soon, though, she snapped out of it.

"I was pretty amazed at the invective," says Jim Fowler. "I'd say she handled all that stress very well. We're both very surprised by the high profile she's achieved. That's been an unhappy byproduct of what she set out to do."

Fowler soldiered on, attempting days later to make sense of the storm she had unleashed. "It's curious," she wrote, "that he often has such a hard time making a connection with many working class Americans. . . . For all his soaring rhetoric, there is a dispassion about him. . . . His Puritanical streak, moreover, while amusing to the press can be off-putting to everybody else."