The horse race lives in 2004. It lives defiantly, as two recent accounts show.

Let the record reflect that on the first day of 2004, Adam Nagourney, political reporter for the New York Times, wrote an assessment of the campaign for president in which the word Internet did not appear once. (Although he did mention an email message the Gephardt campaign sent out.)

The next day a similar article--taking stock of the race so far--appeared in the Washington Post. There too the word Internet did not show up. "Rivals hone their stop Dean strategies" was the headline on Jim VandeHei's page one account. It's a standard entry in the horse race category, strategy division:

The strategies range from Rep. Richard A. Gephardt's one-state last stand in Iowa to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's rapid-fire attacks on Dean to retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark's national campaign on electability. All of them depend on Dean stumbling during the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary the following week.

The polls tell you who's head but not why, or how things are going to "play out," as reporters and pundits say. For that we need savvy analysis, and this especially means the view of insiders, the savviest of all. In his sources, statements, and overall style, Adam Nagourney of the Times Washington bureau--well respected among peers for his experience and knowledge of the game--is as inside as they get.

And so his quotes came from observers like former Senator Bob Kerry (who had once run in the primaries), Bruce Reed of the "centrist Democratic Leadership Council," (the ascendant faction during the Clinton years) and Simon Rosenberg, "former adviser to Mr. Clinton who now heads the New Democrat Network, a group of moderate Democrats."

Along with his named sources, Nagourney invents a composite figure to pass along the wisdom of worried insiders-- wisdom he's collected by calling around. The source's name is "Democrats" or "some Democrats," placeholder terms for a faction speaking through Nagourney, who is their medium. I wrote down the phrases that appear when this composite figure speaks:

* party officials say...
* many Democrats describe...
* a state where Democrats say...
* what Democrats described....
* many Democrats say they believe...
* concerns among many Democrats...
* unsettling Democrats who have said...
* some Democrats expressed concern...
* many Democrats said...
* several Democrats said (twice)...
* many Democrats warned
* some campaign officials argued...
* and some Democrats said ...

And what are the insiders chattering about? Changes in the primary system intended to produce a stronger candidate are compressing the action and forcing the candidates to attack each other. Nagourney figured he had the goods for a Race Turns Negative Early story. And he did. "The nastiness of this campaign makes it difficult to go to an overarching message," Bob Kerrey says. Horse race journalism has its own sound. It is generated by the sports and military cliches that characterize most writing in the genre. Listen to the language as Nagourney comments: