Amateur Campaign Blogger Scoops the Pros

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 9, 2008; A01

Mayhill Fowler says she never planned to ask Bill Clinton the question that unleashed a decidedly unpresidential tirade.

But in the crush of the crowd in South Dakota last Monday, when she raised the topic of "that hatchet job" on him in Vanity Fair, the former president called the article's author "slimy," "sleazy" and a "scumbag," tightly gripping Fowler's hand the whole time. "I'm sure he had no idea who I was," the 61-year-old Tennessee native says.

He quickly found out. Fowler is a Huffington Post blogger whose audiotape of the exchange exploded across the media landscape, prompting Clinton to apologize for his language. And the episode came just two months after Fowler rocked Barack Obama's campaign by reporting his comments at a closed fundraiser that "bitter" small-town Americans "cling to guns or religion."

"I have no journalistic training," says the woman who spent the previous 15 years trying unsuccessfully to get several books and novels published. "I just discovered that I'm impelled to get out there and get the truth of the matter." But that has required overcoming her natural reluctance to hurt her political side.

Fowler is part of a new breed -- citizen journalist, liberal advocate, agent provocateur -- and her success has stirred questions about her methods. Fowler freely admits she has donated to Obama's campaign and started her blogging stint a year ago because she admired him.

She is one of 2,500 people, from writers to academics to accountants, working with Off the Bus, a $200,000 venture launched by the Huffington Post and New Assignment, the brainchild of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. The idea is to unleash ordinary folks on the presidential campaign and give them a technology-powered megaphone.

"When you're in the bubble, you cover every story the same way," says Arianna Huffington, founder of the liberal Web site. "At Off the Bus, because they're not part of the professional gaggle, they can come up with their own views of what's happening, which may be different from what the conventional wisdom is saying."

They also have to be well off, since most are given technical support but little reimbursement, although a limited number receive stipends. With help from her lawyer husband, Fowler has been paying for her own cross-country travel, often chasing the Obama bus in a rental car and blogging in her pajamas in the middle of the night.

Fowler was an unlikely recruit, if only because her mother -- "a typical Southern iron-fisted matriarch" -- banned all talk of politics at home. That was because her dad had spent 14 years as mayor of Memphis, and "she felt politics had destroyed her family," Fowler says.

Politics played no role in Fowler's life as she settled in Oakland after earning a master's degree in English literature at the University of California's Berkeley campus and spent most of her time raising her two daughters. She knew little about Obama and had not even seen his famed 2004 speech to the Democratic convention. But when Fowler, a religious Presbyterian, discovered online a speech the Illinois senator had given at an evangelical mega-church, she was astounded. "It broke me down," she says.

After learning about Off the Bus, Fowler submitted a sample posting -- "a sad, pathetic, puny little thing it was" -- and got a call from Amanda Michel, the project's director and a former aide in the Howard Dean and John Kerry presidential campaigns. Michel asked whether she wanted to write about Obama's grass-roots efforts in San Francisco.

Fowler soon expanded her turf and says she found the campaign trail addictive. She had wanted to be a writer since the eighth grade and now, at last, she saw her chance.

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."

Last week, when Bill Clinton was making one of his final stops in Milbank, S.D., Fowler decided she would ask him to pass on an interview request to his wife.

The hot story at the moment was a Vanity Fair article, by Todd Purdum, that examined Clinton's fast-paced lifestyle and raised questions about whether he had more than a friendship with a series of women. The Clinton camp had denounced the piece, and Purdum had responded that the personal questions had been raised not by Republicans but by unnamed current and former Clinton advisers.

When Clinton reached across the rope line to shake Fowler's hand, she dropped the business card intended for his wife. Instead, still clutching her digital tape recorder, Fowler blurted out the question about the Vanity Fair piece. She did not identify herself as a blogger. "If it hadn't been such a chaotic scene, of course I would have," she says. "But there wasn't a chance to."

Once again, Fowler hesitated. "I wasn't really intending to put out the entire audio of the speech," she says. That changed after a conversation with Michel. Asked about the final decision, she says: "My name's on the piece and I'm going to have to live with it."

Mary Katherine Ham, a conservative blogger, says that while she would insist on identifying herself, "politicians need to learn that anyone can break news, and citizens who run into you -- even if you're not writing for the Huffington Post -- can post it anywhere."

In an e-mail, Fowler says she has come to realize that her presence "flummoxes some longtime journalists -- because suddenly here I am, unpaid but as a consequence with much more freedom to find out what's going on out there, and writing for a new and encroaching media that is a Wild Wild West of lawlessness." But she has also had to reexamine her own beliefs.

"Over time, I've become more like a traditional journalist," Mayhill says. "I'm now much more skeptical and much more distanced."