With Maxine Washington's case, the easiest thing Longshanks could do, and which he'd already done in this instance, would be to give a call to one of the twelve or so reporters with whom he had a symbiotic relationship -- he provided them with scoops, and in exchange, they didn't have to do any actual work of their own -- and then let them choose from the array of bizarre, speculative, damaging and always diverting information he had about Maxine Washington, her husband, her children, and pretty much everyone she'd ever known. Her world was filled with misdeeds small and large -- a few of them even intentional.

When Longshanks had begun in this line of work, after graduating from the political management program at George Washington University, he was fairly surprised -- shocked, actually -- by how easy it was to feed stories to the press. The first time he'd done it, he simply e-mailed, anonymously, a short note about the then-governor of Illinois' connection to a pair of brothers, the Hsus, who owned one of the riverboat casinos and who'd just been convicted of racketeering. Longshanks checked the list of the governor's donors going back twelve years, found the Hsu brothers' names -- they'd given $28,500 in 1991 -- and sent the information to the Midway Picayune. He expected nothing, really. At best, he figured, an editor would grill him about it, they'd find extenuating circumstances for the donations (they'd somehow find the nuances of the situation), and if the facts ever saw the light of day, they would be couched between many layers of qualifications and counterclaims.

Instead, his e-mail ran, almost unedited, in the newspaper two days later. He'd gotten no e-mails back, no response at all. But there it was, below the fold but on the front page, a suggestive if unprobing 12-inch article about "questions about the governor's connection to racketeering suspects Jacob and Joshua Hsu." The article spoke of "brewing controversy" and of "growing concern," when Longshanks knew that he was the only one who'd made the connection. It was fascinating, this process, thrilling and so quick -- and it made him feel powerful, almost omnipotent. If he could so easily shape perceptions and events, could he also influence the weather? Could he tell his parents, recently converted Mormons living in Arizona, that he was gay? Perhaps not.

But it was too easy. And it became infinitely easier once he got friendly with a cabal of reporters, at least two from every major paper in the state, from East St. Louis to Chicago, Springfield to Carbondale. Far from being suspicious of his motives -- for they knew who he was and who he worked for -- the reporters were only too happy to pick up the phone and chat whenever he called, and were even happier to take the feces Longshanks would drop in their hands and smear it all over their pages.

For a while, Longshanks wondered idly why it seemed that the vast majority of the political coverage in the state -- and surely the nation at large -- seemed to originate in the offices of people like himself, paid party operatives (for he could always spot a story planted by his GOP counterparts), but after a while he stopped wondering and contented himself with knowing that it was the natural state of things, and all involved seemed to accept their place in the media-political ecosystem. The reporters had grown, he figured, a bit complacent, happy to take what was provided to them, much in the way that kept animals would soon forget how to hunt.

Longshanks' staff didn't have to work very hard to dig up what they did. In an afternoon his team would find more than enough to cast shadows over most of the opponents Longshanks had been assigned to investigate. It was then just a matter of shaping it into a story and selling it to the appropriate newspaper. His guy at the Sun-Times, Doyle Davis, for example, liked the ribald and bizarre -- the last thing Longshanks had fed him involved an alderman's Doberman who'd bitten the face off an elderly neighbor; the incident had been covered up, or an attempt at that had been made -- while his friend at the Tribune liked ethical conflicts, financial canoodling, and, above all, flip-flopping. Anything involving an elected official changing his or her mind in any way whatsoever was red meat for Sally Strachan, the Trib's neocon political columnist. So it was just a matter of matching the information to the appropriate vehicle, deciding into which category any given piece of information fit. To that end, Longshanks had pinpointed six primary products he could sell:

1. The Gaffe

This was by far the easiest to find and easiest to pass along. At any given time, Longshanks had three full-time staffers videotaping the public and less-public appearances of his prey, looking for off-the-cuff remarks, personal asides, casual jokes, and botched answers to leading questions, which he also planted. He'd made his name with gaffes, after catching the now-disgraced state treasurer referring, during a visit to a high school civics class, to "Bell Curve" theorist Charles Murray as "perhaps the greatest philosopher our world knows. A peach of a guy, and handsome as heck." It was gaspingly easy, all this. You point a camera at most state-level officials long enough, you get anything you want. In most cases, you could actually dial up whatever gaffe you wanted, which Longshanks had done when he was asked to remove a gubernatorial candidate from the Iowa race.

And though they were his bread and butter, gaffes could be found and transmitted and blown out of all proportion so effortlessly that it hardly seemed fun anymore. Even in the time he'd been on the job, gaffes had gone from occupying about 25 percent of the political coverage to more than half, and even Longshanks was getting tired of the storyline. But for the reporters and their readers, gaffes were comprehensible: Someone said something they shouldn't have said. Someone went somewhere they shouldn't have gone. A hand wasn't firmly shaken, a term was mispronounced, a fly was open, a shirt untucked -- and thus, a constituency was enflamed. Gaffes required no understanding of economics or history or even how government might improve the lives of the citizenry. Gaffes were simple, easily summarized -- did he really tell a joke about Barney Frank? -- and always followed a comfortingly similar trajectory: a) Gaffe happens, usually in a small and out-of-the-way gathering; b) Gaffe is discussed on the Internet (Longshanks had dozens of part-time paid Internet discussers, most of them based in India, where the chat-room services were much cheaper and the grammar was infinitely better); c) Within 24 hours, outrage over gaffe reaches critical mass and finds its way into broadcasts and newspapers; d) Candidate or official tries to ignore gaffe; e) Newspapers and media, not at all liking to be ignored, push the issue, wondering why an apology is not forthcoming; f) Candidate or official finally makes an apology; g) Said chat rooms decide that the apology was not sufficient, demonstrates lack of contrition, pigheadedness, insensitivity, etc; h) Questions are raised whether or not this gaffe means that the candidate or official is fit for office, if they should be removed from candidacy or office, and further, if he or she should be jailed or worse; i) Finally, after five days to a week, the gaffe is properly apologized for, leaving only: j) three more days of postmortems; k) two days of press self-analysis; l) and a final conclusion that perhaps the media spends too much time on such things, which after all, mean nothing to no one.

Episode 18: This Person Is Out of Control and Could Be Crazy