As Obama Aide, Reporter Dons Flack Jacket

Douglass consulted Mike McCurry, a White House press secretary for Bill Clinton, for advice. "He told me," she said, "that you really have to dump your own opinions out of your head" to properly spout the candidate's views.

McCurry likens the switch to a film critic who is handed a camera and told to make a movie. "She wants to do it in a different way from the spinners of the past," he says. "She wants to get away from the rat-a-tat-tat back-and-forth and keep focused on what journalists need to get the job done."

GOP strategist Dan Schnur, a spokesman for McCain's 2000 campaign, says that Douglass was known for being fair but that the transition may be difficult. "The more us communication types are trained in spin, the more different we become from the reporters who are covering our candidates," he says.

Obama's closest confidant, David Axelrod, says Douglass is already an asset. "She's very fluent in national issues," he says. "Obviously she understands network television from the inside out."

During the long slog through the primaries, Obama earned a reputation for keeping the press at a distance and still holds a news conference only once a week -- compared with McCain's near-daily interaction with reporters -- although the Democrat sometimes takes questions on the fly. "He likes to talk to reporters; he told me that," Douglass says. "He's going to be plenty accessible."

Obama is still feeling his way with the national media. He has hesitated to agree to an Associated Press proposal for a "body watch" -- a pool of reporters who shadow him at all times, even when he is on vacation -- in part out of concern for his daughters' privacy.

The Illinois senator may have unrealistic expectations about news management. In telling reporters on his plane that he would no longer discuss his search for a running mate, he said that if they heard "secondhand accounts, rumors, gossip about this election process, you can take it from me that it is wrong." Of course, details usually leak out, and they are sometimes accurate.

With Hillary Clinton's withdrawal, the campaign entered a new phase last week. Gone are the brutal, eight-stop days that exhausted both the candidate and his press corps. The new schedule is one or two events a day, perhaps a fundraiser, and selected interviews.

The media intensity has faded a bit as well. With news organizations having obliterated their budgets covering the nonstop Democratic primary, NBC's Lee Cowan was the only television correspondent on last week's Obama swing through North Carolina and Missouri, and reporters for just four newspapers -- the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune -- tagged along.

Douglass's first television appearance as a newly minted flack took place on her old network, ABC, the morning after Obama clinched the nomination. The campaign plane had landed at 3 a.m. in Chicago, where Douglass has taken an apartment next door to campaign headquarters, and she was the leadoff interview on "Good Morning America."

After saying, "All right, Linda, the niceties are over," anchor Chris Cuomo asked whether Obama might pick Clinton or another woman as his running mate. Douglass deflected the question -- "There is no short list, there is no long list" -- and pivoted to her talking points, ticking off "the very sharp contrasts" with McCain in "health care and whether the tax cuts go to the rich, as John McCain wants, or to the middle class, as Barack Obama wants, and getting out of Iraq."

Behind the scenes, Douglass tries to dig out answers to reporters' questions. "I bug everyone all day. I'm driving our staff crazy," she says. She also preps Obama for interviews and news conferences, such as Tuesday's session in St. Louis, when she and Axelrod helped him craft a response to McCain's attack on his tax policy hours earlier.