Yeah, right. Like she's listening.

That distant pop was Bob Somerby's head exploding as he read the Times this morning.

“I’m Hillary Clinton, and I’m running for president,” she says at campaign appearances. Lamenting that her public image has been distorted by caricature, she often says, “I may be the most famous person you don’t really know.” In the cliché of contemporary politics, Mrs. Clinton is “reintroducing herself to the American people.”

She is, in this latest unveiling, the Nurturing Warrior. She displays a cozy acquaintance (“Let’s chat”) and leaderly confidence (“I’m in it to win it”). She is a tea-sipping girlfriend who vows to “deck” anyone who attacks her; a giggly mom who invokes old Girl Scout songs and refuses to apologize for voting for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002. Her aim, of course, is to show that she is tough enough to lead Americans in wartime but tender enough to understand their burdens.

Over the years, Mrs. Clinton has evolved through a series of female personas. Her outspoken feminism and perceived putdown of cookie-baking mothers provoked fierce criticism. She became the classic “woman wronged” after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

As a Senate candidate in 2000, Mrs. Clinton embraced the role of an attentive “listener” as opposed to the power-hungry climber many had suspected. In the Senate, Mrs. Clinton has applied herself to winning over colleagues and becoming one of the boys.

In Mrs. Clinton’s campaign now, her operative conceit is “the conversation.” It is impossible to attend a Hillary-for-president event and forget you are joining a “conversation,” instead of hearing a conventional political speech. Mrs. Clinton relentlessly repeats the catchword, and for those who missed it, there are huge “Let the Conversation Begin” signs on the wall.

After each presentation, Mrs. Clinton engages in a frenzy of 20-second conversations with the rhythmic efficiency of an assembly line.

It goes on and on.

In case you missed it, the "operative conceit" of the Times coverage of Hillary Clinton is not that New York voters -- especially those Republican-leaning upstaters -- actually appreciated the "conversation" she conducted in 2000, or that she's been a very good Senator and a leader in the Democratic Party. No, instead the Times relentlessly repeats the catchword that she's a serial faker.

Mrs. Clinton is a prodigious nodder. She is always nodding, in an array of distinctive flavors: the stern, deferential nod (at a Senate news conference, when her colleague Evan Bayh described conditions in Afghanistan); the empathetic, lips-pursed nod (when a man in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, tells her about his son’s epilepsy); the squinty, disbelieving nod (when a general testifies on Iraq before the Senate Armed Services Committee); the dutiful acknowledgment nod (when being applauded); and the blushing nod (when a veteran in Des Moines tells her “I think you look very nice”).

When bored, Mrs. Clinton will occasionally fall into a far-off gaze before catching herself, defaulting to a nod.

The nodding appears unconscious, but not always. She nodded through a news conference with New York lawmakers discussing medical care for Sept. 11 relief workers.

“Nine-eleven was an act of war,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, said as Mrs. Clinton stood by, head bobbing.

“The villains aren’t the terrorists,” Mr. Nadler continued. “The villains live in the White House.”

At which point Mrs. Clinton, perhaps sensing that the rhetoric had gotten too hot, stopped nodding.

Or -- maybe, just maybe -- she stopped nodding because she no longer agreed with the speaker. No, she "sensed" that she might be making a mistake if she appeared to agree that the current occupants of the White House are terrorists. I'd sense that too. And I'd stop nodding.

But, in the view of the Times she's a bobblehead doll. Thank you, Mark Leibovich, for raising the level of our political discourse. At least the Times doesn't permit potty-mouth language on its fucking grey pages.

The Times is our paper of record. If -- Maureen Dowd aside -- the news side is going to treat the Senator's campaign as if it is little more than launching a new product to gullible consumers, then we are doomed to a repeat of the 2000 campaign. And we all know now the result of the media's treatment of the two candidates for the most powerful position in the world that year.

It might, in fact, be helpful if the media would recognize their role in the 2000 campaign. And, then, instead of treating every campaign appearance like the homecoming dance (look, Gore's fat; he's wearing brown; isn't George W. cool?), we might get some substantive coverage rather than an analysis of Hillary Clinton's penmanship.

The New York Times might consider taking Hillary Clinton up on her campaign theme and actually have a conversation with her. And the other candidates. Tell us what they think, not what they look like.