The New Yorker's cover story this week is on ABC News's online political report The Note. It says: How one Web site sets the agenda for the political press -- and has turned the 2004 campaign into the ultimate insider's game.

In a way, it's also about the evolution of American politics and the effect that evolution has had on two generations of Halperins: Mark, the politics director for ABC News and the creator of The Note, and his father Morton, an old-school public servant who served under Presidents Johnson and Nixon.

The article, by David Grann, starts at the RNC, describing Mark's tools of the trade: three TV monitors, a laptop, a BlackBerry, a cellphone and a pager.

It lists the type of information he collects.

Mostly, though, Halperin collects leaks and scuttlebutt from the campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment, or what Halperin calls “the Gang of 500.”

Interesting: In a nation of 294 million people, only 500 really count when it comes to national politics.

To perform at his optimum, Mark said he had to synchronize his “biological rhythms with the news cycle, so that information is not lying out there unanalyzed for too long.” He measures time not by conventional units—hours, minutes—but by news programs. “Twelve o’clock for a normal person might be ‘Let’s think about having lunch,’ but for me it’s ‘Rush Limbaugh is on,’” he said. “Six-thirty is not dinnertime; it’s time for Peter, Dan, and Tom.”

Doing his job has cost Halperin most normal diversions: Sports pages, novels, naps, uninterrupted vacations, Broadway shows, leisurely walks, silence.

One magic moment for him this summer was hearing Dubya tell Matt Lauer of NBC's Today show that he didn't think the war on terror could be won.

Halperin perked up. “Did you hear that?” he said. In an era of prepackaged rhetoric, there was nothing that delighted him as much as hearing a candidate saying something startling—something off message.

A big off-message score for The Note in 2002 was Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, a Republican on the verge of becoming Senate Majority Leader, speaking for segregation at a 100th birthday party for Strom Thurmond.

The incident happened on Dec. 5, 2002 and didn't get much coverage that day. Halperin put it in The Note on Dec. 6. A few left-leaning blogs picked it up, then James Carville talked about it on Crossfire that night and the rest was history.

Lott relinquished the leadership post two weeks later.

In the intervening time, some politicos have come to complain The Note is too influential.

Some reporters lobby to be listed there, thinking it's good promo for their stories.

Morton Halperin

Morton was the youngest-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. One of his jobs was overseeing the Pentagon Papers project -- a secret review of the Vietnam War's history.

While he continued on with the Nixon administration, he eventually broke with it (Morton was a Republican) over the 1970 invasion of Cambodia. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked, Nixon became even more suspicious of Halperin, and ordered his phone tapped by the FBI.

Morton was part of a generation of anonymous professional policymakers.

By the time the late 1980s rolled around, a new era was emerging, one defined by media-savvy professional politicos.

In 1991, Mark was assigned to cover a master of the new paradigm: William Jefferson Clinton.

It was a time when the relationship between politicos and journos became increasingly symbiotic: The politicos needed to get their message out; the journos needed insider detail.

Mark makes an appearance in the seminal film The War Room: He is briefing Clinton aide George Stephanopolous so George can then spin back to him.

Morton was nominated for a Pentagon job by Clinton. However, conservative partisans tried to get to Clinton by attacking him. They claimed the CIA had a "secret dossier" that documented his "subversive activities." Morton eventually withdrew his name.

The Note's ideology

It doesn't have one.  The Note’s principal allegiance is not to ideas but to the cult of the scoop and to the notion that success trumps all other values. And those who treat politics too seriously, who do not see the world with the cool detachment of the pros, are suspect. ...

Halperin recognizes that it is corrosive for the press to treat a campaign as mere spectacle. On October 8th, he wrote a memorandum to colleagues at ABC that seemed to reflect his ambivalence about the tone of American political coverage. “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes [sic] all the time, but these are not central to his effort to win,” he wrote. In contrast, Halperin argued, the Bush campaign hopes “to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.” He noted, “We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.” Though the memo was somewhat overstated and crudely expressed, it tried to do what The Note almost never does: make a moral distinction.

Conservative commentators went ballistic when they heard that.

Halperin refused to comment directly on the incident. However, he had told me, “In American political life, what is always creams what ought to be.” I asked him how The Note would cover his father’s era. He was silent, then said, “I couldn’t even answer that.” Another time, he said, “The dumbing-down, lowest-common-denominator dynamic that cable and Internet and tabloid culture have brought means that anything that is big and exclusive and legitimate is quickly turned into something trivial, tawdry, and dumbed-down. If we had the most consequential scoop of all times about wrongdoing in the Bush Administration, it would quickly turn into ‘How’s it polling? What are they saying about it on Drudge? What are they saying about it on “Hannity & Colmes”?’ And it would be reduced to its cheapest, most ephemeral essence.”

I particularly liked this line here: Yet perhaps the ultimate consequence of The Note’s style of political coverage is not the trivialization of important stories but, rather, the inflation of trivial ones.

It's something of a systemic disease, methinks. There's only so much real news, but all that space has to be filled up somehow.

One agenda-shaker at the RNC was reporting that the Kerry campaign was shaking up its team -- a story the other media ran with.

“I got Kerry people calling and saying, ‘What’s the deal—am I being fired?’” Halperin said.

Finally, Kerry dispatched his top team of specialists—his campaign manager, his senior strategist, his pollster—to New York in order to signal to reporters that no campaign staffers were being fired. The only change was that some former Clinton strategists had been hired to build a more effective rapid-response team, which could quell rumors like the one about the shakeup. ...

The Note also assessed the impact of its speculation about changes in the Kerry campaign, without acknowledging its own role in propagating the rumor and in contributing to the need for such a war room. The Note wrote that the Kerry story had successfully nudged the campaign “off message enough so that the Democratic storyline for the week is ‘campaign shakeup’ rather than convention response.”

In the long run, Halperin told me, the new rapid-response team would be essential in creating “a narrative” that Kerry was gaining momentum. “Kerry isn’t the best Presidential candidate ever, and, in my professional judgment, he didn’t have the horses around him to win this,” he said. “Now he does.”

Such good advice, and for free! :)

Now, Halperin was only reporting what he heard, but you gotta wonder if his news judgment was affected by his personal opinion about the Kerry campaign's management team.

But if that was the case, does it matter?

I'll answer that later.

More later ...