INSIDE DOPE.

Folder: The Campaign Trail

"There is always some new tidbit," Mark Halperin said. "You just have to ferret it out." It was the first day of the Republican Convention, in New York, and although the sun had not yet risen, he had already laid out all he needed for his peculiar trade--three television monitors, a laptop, a BlackBerry, a cell phone, a pager--in a makeshift space on the fifth floor of Madison Square Garden. Outside the Washington establishment, Halperin is known, if at all, as a journalist (his official title is political director of ABC News), but within it he is considered the leading purveyor of inside dope. As the founder of The Note, a political news digest that appears on the ABC News Web site each weekday morning by eleven o'clock, he collects information the way bookies keep tabs on the latest odds, or photographers chase the fading light. He collects polling data, no matter what the time of year or the size of the sample. He collects any rise or fall--even the smallest blip--in the projected electoral count. He also collects dirt, such as the unsealed divorce records of Jack Ryan, a Senate candidate from Illinois, which detailed visits to an alleged "sex club," and which forced Ryan out of the race. He collects other things, too: arcane statistics from documents that government agencies churn out but few read; embargoed political books (The Note footnoted Kitty Kelley's gossipy portrait of the Bush family twenty-four hours before it was released, beneath the teaser "Here Kitty, Kitty"); wire reports; radio transcripts; pieces of legislation; the guest lists of Georgetown dinner parties; and other minutiae that are of little interest to the ordinary citizen but are essential to his calling ("2:00 p.m.: Sen. John Kerry and his family hold a barbeque at the Heinz Farm, Fox Chapel, Pa"). 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."

"We try to channel what the chattering class is chattering about, and to capture the sensibility, ethos, and rituals of the Gang of 500, which still largely sets the political agenda for the country," Halperin explained during one of several recent conversations.

Mary Matalin, a campaign adviser to President Bush, described Halperin as "the insider's insider's insider" and the readership of The Note as a kind of "Skull and Bones for the political class." The Note is written in a runic argot that is often incomprehensible to the outsider. A typical edition includes comments like this one:

So for the Rs, the formula is simple: Positive ads (to boost the POTUS favs back up) + negative ads (to define Kerry) + free media from the negative ads (to increase the bang for the buck and bracket Kerry's free media message, as with today's gas tax ad) + presidential and vice presidential speeches and trips to swing states (like today's economic message in Wisconsin by Mr. Bush) + a crafty congressional agenda (except for that pesky highway bill . . .) + a foreign-trips-Olympics-9/11-anniversary-debates strategy like you wouldn't believe = 270 electoral votes or more.

Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, is sometimes described as S.M.I.P. ("smartest man in politics"), and Kerry's former campaign manager Jim Jordan as S.S.M.I.P. ("second smartest man in politics"). Halperin's references can be so obscure that they baffle even members of the Gang of 500. Recently, after The Note joked that a cabal of left-wing journalists was holding meetings, "per usual," on the top floor of Lauriol Plaza, a Mexican restaurant in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, Rush Limbaugh announced on his radio show that he finally had proof of a liberal-media conspiracy. "Ladies and gentlemen . . . it's been admitted to, if I'm reading this correctly, by ABC's The Note," he said.

ABC does not release the number of hits that The Note receives each day, but it is believed to be about thirty thousand--less than one per cent of the readership of the Times. Yet its readers are, as Halperin puts it, "among the most sought-after eyeballs in the country." And the Note's very knowingness about those in the know has made it, since its creation, in January, 2002, the most influential tip sheet in Washington. "The President has the P.D.B., the Presidential Daily Briefing, where the C.I.A. takes all its information and gives it to the President," Paul Begala, a former campaign adviser to Bill Clinton and a co-host of CNN's "Crossfire," told me. "For everyone else in Washington, Halperin and The Note are our version of the P.D.B." Bill and Hillary Clinton are said to read it, as do Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, and Terry McAuliffe, the head of the Democratic National Committee; when Rove is on the road, he has a printout sent to him.