It's worth noting, though, that Edwards had already suspended his campaign—due in part to the love-child scandal, but still—and endorsed Obama by the time Hitchen corralled him in Beverly Hills. All the stories Levine submitted to the Pulitzer board—based though they may have been on oldfashioned shoe-leather reporting—were published after Obama was elected. Levine insists that Obama was considering Edwards for attorney general up until the Hunter scandal broke, but it's still hard to argue that the Enquirer's scoops helped the American public to dodge a bullet of any kind.

One thing Levine knows is that these stories touched a nerve. As the Edwards scoops rolled out, he says, "I received phone calls every day from people all across America—Middle America, small towns. The lady who's the treasurer is effing the mayor. The police chief is looting drugs and selling them. I said to these people, 'I appreciate you calling, but this is the National Enquirer. Tell your local newspaper.'"

For what it's worth, it was also the Globe that reported, in its February 8, 2010, issue, that in 2009 the president and the first lady "blew $10 MILLION of YOUR money" on drunken White House parties, including a shindig at which guests "wildly gyrated to the sounds of the RB group Earth Wind and Fire in the dignified East Room—and right under a portrait of George and Martha Washington," who were presumably disgusted.

FESS PARKER MARKED FOR DEATH

Edwards was the first major story the Enquirer broke online. "We're the last of the Mohicans in terms of discovering our Web site," Levine says. They caught Edwards at the Beverly Hilton after that week's paper locked; worried that Edwards would attempt to spin the story before next week's edition, they posted the story on the Web site on Tuesday morning.

The Enquirer's full-time Web staff consists of one guy. Dick Siegel is in his fifties, works out of a cubicle decorated with color rod comic-book covers from the '60s; the fact that he's an obvious pop-culture junkie ("I was able to write Fess Parker's obit, or 90 percent of it, off the top of my head, which is scary") makes him the ideal man to run the Enquirer's Web site, where Old Hollywood types—Natalie Wood, Ingrid Bergman—tend to get more hits than Justin Bieber and the Jersey Shore kids. (By way of illustration, he pulls up a recent blog post, sourced to Carrie Fisher's Twitter, about speed fiend eddie fisher.)

"My forte is not journalism," Siegel says. "I'd be fired. I had been working at the late, lamented Weekly World News. That was after my film jobs—I'd been an independent-film cinematographer. Really bad horror movies. Including one that I wrote, about zombies at a women's prison."

He tells me that the Weekly World News gig was good training for what he does now. You learned to write short stories, in AP style, even if they concerned the travails of Bat Boy, "and present them in a serious manner, even if the punch line was a joke."

But it makes sense that someone with Siegel's background wound up at the Enquirer. The tabs are a form of rogue pop culture. They're vehicles for celebrity adoration, but they burrow, termitelike, into the sanctioned narratives of American fame. They're camp—a form of fantasy that revels and resists. They're a comic-book, zombie-movie draft of Hollywood history, right down to the zingy sobriquets.

"It's like professional wrestling," Siegel says. "When we wrote about Tiger Woods's wife, we always described her as 'livid,' so now she's always 'livid Elin.' And Rielle Hunter is 'the New-Age Temptress.'"

Heroes and villains, in primary colors. "That's what separates the giant scandals from the everyday scandals," Levine says, explaining to me why Tiger Woods and Edwards, stepping out on his cancer-stricken wife, were tabloid rocket fuel. "If somebody is a hero and they do something unthinkable, something unconscionable, if the betrayal is so overwhelmingly dirty and sickening, that's what makes what we do."

At the same time, Levine says, the tabloids' coverage of famous people at their most abject—their most bloated or drunk or cheatedon or close to death—offers readers a kind of reassurance.

"One of the formulas of the National Enquirer," he says, "is showing mainstream Americans that the people they admire have the same problems they do. Bad marriages, it could be money issues, health issues, alcoholism, weight issues."

That's a stock explanation, of course; Levine's basically paraphrasing Aaron Spelling's definition of gossip: "rich people having problems money can't solve."

I'm not sure either of them is entirely right. If (as we're constantly told) we live in such a cynical age, why is it such surprising-and-therefore-compelling news that (for example) Sandra Bullock's husband, this TV-hack grease monkey, turned out to be the kind of guy who'd seek out Nazi-fetish models to allegedly break his marriage vows with? Are there really still "mainstream Americans" who view famous people—or politicians—as their moral betters?

Maybe tabloids don't exist to disabuse us of our innocence regarding the personalities they cover. Maybe, by presenting obvious-inretrospect news—famous people, like all people, drink too much, do drugs, cheat, and die alone—as "shocking," they give us a little bit of our innocence back, allowing us, the cynical readers numbed by a cynical age, to feel shocked (even though we're not) the way horror movies (in which the zombies don't pose any actual threat) let us feel scared.

CONTAMINATED HAMBURGER

Just before 3 p.m., everybody gathers in Levine's office waiting for word.

"We're the people's champion," Levine says, "so it doesn't matter."

But there's still an anticipatory buzz—at least for a few seconds, until Levine's assistant, Patricia Gonzalez, comes in with a printout. The Enquirer hasn't won anything. The Pulitzers for investigative reporting go to the Web site ProPublica, for a story about a hospital euthanizing patients after Hurricane Katrina, and the Philadelphia Daily News, for a series on corrupt cops.

People trickle back to their desks; Levine reads from the list of finalists.

"In investigative reporting, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, for reporting and computer analysis that unraveled $10 billion in suspicious Florida real estate transactions. And members of the New York Times staff, for their reporting on contaminated hamburger and other food-safety issues."

Levine does some phone interviews, mentions Pulitzer and Hearst, mentions Spitzer.

"I think that [the Times's] reporting on Spitzer, while it was great reporting, was a drop in the bucket compared to the effort that we had to go through," he says, "particularly being the Enquirer. Because unlike The Times, we have very little access to the people involved. We're outsiders; we're rebels."

I ask Levine, How do you compete with contaminated hamburger?

"It's all good journalism," he says, "but you have to wonder if these editors did not have some built-in bias against the Enquirer because we're a supermarket tabloid."