What do you do when the candidate you support is widely perceived as arrogant, aloof, and downright rude?

You need to say stuff like this:

.....[A]s the crowd dispersed and the band packed up, he spoke for 28 minutes more with the few dozen who had made their way to the front rows.

He nodded at their whispered advice. He invited them to visit his Web site. He signed their programs and accepted their gifts, held their hands and squeezed their shoulders, stretched his ample wingspan three rows deep to touch outstretched fingers and bent his 6-foot-4 frame in half to put his face in front of a man in a wheelchair.

I am fast becoming a major fan of Jodi Wilgoren. While she's considered by most people to be a mere journalist, I see her as a creative (if partisan) writer of greater talent than most people realize -- and which I think has gone unappreciated for too long.

I would probably have missed this latest Times story had it not aroused the curiosity of Captain Ed, who asks a few questions:

Why would the New York Times talk about John Kerry's skills on the rope line and fail to mention this disastrous event that appears to have kicked off his month-long decline in the polls? This happened less than four weeks ago! Either Wilgoren is completely ignorant of it -- which calls into question her competence as a political correspondent -- or the Times has decided to ignore it in favor of synthesizing Kerry into a gregarious, likable candidate.

I think she's a talented political operative in journalist drag, and deserves some kind of award (if only such a category existed).

Not that I haven't admired Jodi Wilgoren's skills before

So, something had to be done. And in my opinion, the dutiful Jodi Wilgoren wielded the hatchet. (Has she helped out in the past?)

From a rhetorical standpoint, of course, there is nothing new or surprising about Wilgoren's focus on items of apparel like Birkenstocks. She blamed the Columbine shootings on a $99.00 trenchcoat. [Wilgoren, Jodi. "Society of Outcasts Began With a $99 Black Coat." New York Times 25 April 1999: A30.]

Fashionism? It's wearing thin, Jodi.

We need more references to Birkenstocks! More trenchcoats! More wingspans and ropes!

And of course, more plastic daisies! I am sure Jodi knows all about that, but she's not telling! Aw.... come on Jodi; we need to know! (The blogosphere is in love with political fashion statements.)

Then there was the carefully crafted hit piece against Howard Dean's wife. (As I noted before, it's tough to get these days.....) Wilgoren's not-so-sly innuendo was picked up by Maureen Dowd, who clucking along in the well-timed peckfest, concluded with "Physician, heal thy spouse." (Hillarious!)

Is Wilgoren as good as Dowd?

Here's John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine -- and a guy who obviously knows talent when he sees it:

Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Dean beat reporter Jodi Wilgoren have distinguished themselves in their cynical disdain for Dean. Dowd's self-satirizing poses lost me long ago, but her condescending admonition to Dean and his allegedly unsupportive, unsavvy helpmate -- "physician, heal thy spouse" -- made me think that the Gray Lady's girlish spinster had finally shot her foot through the barrel of an empty joke.

Wilgoren strives daily to adopt a Dowdian tone, so terribly bored with the poses of politicians. Mrs. Dean is described contemptuously in the Sawyer interview -- "she looked lovingly at her husband and let out a little giggle" -- and Dean, struggling "to halt his dive in the polls" is portrayed on the stump as newly "unsure of himself," failing in one speech to use a stock line about how "even the Costa Ricans have health insurance for all their people." Isn't that just pathetic -- a camera-shy wife who loves her husband but puts her patients ahead of politics, and a candidate who doesn't always follow the script.

I couldn't find Wilgoren on Friday, not at "non-partisan" Mayor Mike Blastos's thank-you dinner for 100 Dean volunteers at the mayor's restaurant, The Pub, and not at the jam-packed rally (nearly 1,500 people, including 200 spillovers in the downstairs cafeteria) in Keene's middle-school auditorium.

That's right; I was writing about fashion! Yeah, style! Creative writing!

Not journalism.

That's so out of fashion!