For Strobel, it was Mackenzie explaining the intricacies of presidential appointments. For Jonathan Salant, correspondent for The Associated Press in Washington, it was a question relating to a story in September. "The

	Cal Mackenzie, a leading presidential scholar, now immersed in a bipartisan study of the presidential appointment proceess.

[Republican National Committee] transferred millions of dollars to various state parties," Salant said, the day he was writing the story. "I'm guessing they're earmarking it for the fall election. They're getting prepared early for stuff. . . . Am I right? Am I wrong? Is there some other possible explanation? I don't know. You like to step back and have somebody take a look, some objective source."

Whom did he call? Corrado.

"I just left a message for him," Salant said.

He first learned of Corrado several years ago at Congressional Quarterly, where the Colby College professor was on a list of good academic sources. Salant has been calling Waterville ever since. "Some people have a national reputation," Salant said. "Whenever there's a group of academicians, they're there. They're doing this campaign finance institute in Washington now. Corrado's on the board. There's a study on financing the elections; he's part of that group. . . . He's up at Colby, which is in the corner of the country, but if there's a group of campaign finance scholars involved, he's in the middle of it."

But there's more to being a good source than being a plugged-in academician. Asked if there are knowledgeable academics who don't cut it on the air, NPR reporter Peter Overby said, "Yes. Am I going to name any of them? No."

Some would-be sources ramble, said Overby, who covers the "power, money and influence in politics" beat for NPR. Some sources digress. And Corrado? "He's known around NPR as someone you can go to for clear-eyed, objective commentary," Overby said.

"I doubt that George W. Bush has spent one second saying, 'I wonder who our Supreme Court nominees should be?' That's something, if there's a slow day at the White House, he might say to the Attorney General: 'You know, we should probably think about putting together a list.'" –Calvin Mackenzie

The need is for commentary that is succinct but informative. Pointed but objective. "Our editors in New York and Washington want more of this," said Glenn Adams, who covers Maine for the AP. "There is a place for horse-race stories. . . . But there's also a need to supplement that kind of thing with more perspective and more analysis."

And the one-liner. Mackenzie, who lands frequently in the quips columns in The Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor, recollects a call he received before the 1996 election from a political reporter for The Boston Globe. "He called me and he didn't say it explicitly but I could tell he just needed one more quote," Mackenzie said. "I said, 'It's a Seinfeld election; it's an election about nothing.' That was all I needed to say. It was going to be quoted exactly like that. You get a sense of the words you use."

If that qualifies as a sound bite, so be it. "There's nothing wrong with that," said Mark Barabak, a political reporter for The Los Angeles Times. "People tend to disparage sound bites but if a sound bite is taking a complex subject, breaking it down and making it accessible and understandable to a nonexpert in the field, then there's nothing wrong with that. That's something that Tony can do very well."

If you're good, word gets around.

Barabak, who has used Corrado several times on campaign finance, also had spoken with Maisel on congressional issues. But in the course of the interview for this story he was told of Maisel's editing of a forthcoming book on the roles of Jews in American politics. There was a pause. Barabak, in Chicago to do a story on the place of the Midwest in the 2000 presidential race, was punching Maisel's name into a Palm Pilot under the category Jews in Politics. Another source had been added to the list. "I'll hear about them in conversation, or I'll see someone quoted somewhere. I'll call them up," Barabak said.

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