Citizen Mayhill.(The Talk of the Town)(Huffington Post's Mayhill Fowler)

Mayhill Fowler, at present the most famous "citizen journalist" on earth, recently spent a full week at home, in Oakland, after leaving Milbank, South Dakota, with her second major scoop of the campaign season: a three-minute audio clip of Bill Clinton coming unhinged on a rope line and referring to the Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum as "slimy" and "a scumbag." It was Fowler's first extended rest since December, and, feeling a little like "poor Brit," as in Spears, on account of all the sudden attention, she employed her seven-year-old niece, Nadia, as a kind of receptionist to deflect phone inquiries for a while. (Fowler's husband, James, who is a real-estate lawyer, made the mistake of Googling her some weeks back, and had what he called a "dark night of the soul.") Then, as a reward, she took Nadia to an amusement park, and when they returned Fowler found three messages on her answering machine from what she calls "my fellow-Americans."

These Americans, unlike the many Obama supporters who bombarded her with hate mail back in April, after her first scoop (Obama at an ostensibly private fund-raiser: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion"), seemed benign. They had "concerns" that they were hoping Fowler, an Obama supporter herself, might be able to pass on to the Senator. "I thought, Whoa, they don't really understand the relationship of the press to candidates," Fowler said, expressing a sentiment that some of the candidates' staffers may feel about the proliferation of uncredentialled citizens armed with digital recorders.

Fowler, who is sixty-one, with frosted gray hair and gold jewelry, spent the previous three decades as an aspiring writer and the stay-at-home mother of two daughters. She publishes her campaign dispatches on the Huffington Post, as part of a series called "Off the Bus," and was envious of the plastic badges worn by certain members of the travelling press at Obama events, featuring a cartoon of Obama being boiled in a cauldron, while the Clintons tended the fire. "People like me, we just got paper badges," she said, and added that she had begun passing them out to young girls and encouraging the girls to write reports of their own for their "soccer newsletters."

Fowler comes ...