While there’s no guarantee that "Rodham" will be made (and while its existence isn’t exactly new — Slate reported on Young Il Kim’s screenplay last month), the Politico brief is evidence of a level of public interest in Secretary Clinton that's high even by the usual standard.

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Surprise! It's Politico.

I have written tens of thousands of words on what, precisely, is wrong with Politico. But I can put the case much more simply here: It's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.

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Don’t believe that for an instant.

It’s true their political investments didn’t exactly pay off this time around.

“Right now there is stunned disbelief that Republicans fared so poorly after all the money they invested,” said Brent Bozell, president of For America, an Alexandria-based nonprofit that advocates for Christian values in politics.

“Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle,” Donald Trump tweeted. “Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.”

Rove’s two giant political funds — American Crossroads (a Super PAC) and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (a so-called nonprofit “social welfare organization” that doesn’t have to report its donors) — backed Mitt Romney with $127 million spent on more than 82,000 television spots. Rove’s groups spent another $51 million on House and Senate races. Ten of the 12 Senate candidates they supported lost.

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Here’s the agenda:

…tax reform that goes way beyond individuals and rates; much deeper Social Security and Medicare changes than currently envisioned; quick movement on trade agreements, including a proposed one with Europe; an energy policy that exploits the oil and gas boom; and allowing foreign-born students with science expertise to stay here and start businesses.

Do this and there could be not an economic recovery — but a boom, many argue.

Really?  I gotta say, I don’t see it.  In fact, pretty much everything on that list is a) conventional wisdom in DC and b) largely a distraction from where I think the evidence is actually pointing, as I’ll stress in a moment.  To be clear, raising more tax revenues and slowing health care costs are critical in terms of getting our long-term debt situation under control, and immigration reform that provides a path for folks here to stay is also a great idea.  A domestic energy boom is already underway and trade agreements do squat for growth (which doesn’t mean they’re not worth it—but their growth potential is hugely overhyped).

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In an appearance on Bill Simmons' The BS Report podcast today, Silver took aim at the site, which dismissed him as a "one-term celebrity" in an article prior to the election. (Turns out Silver correctly called all 50 states for the second presidential election in a row.)

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To most observers, this narrow majority of voters represents a broad cross-section of the country. To Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, it’s a dangerously limited coalition. Why? Because it doesn’t include enough white people, and particularly, downscale white men:

If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.

A broad mandate this is not.

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Nate Silver does not actually need his army of defenders. He is a wildly successful author and New York Times contributor with a huge audience, and he is smart and witty enough to fight his own battles. I also realize that any defense of Silver plays into the savvy politico notion that liberals are irrationally "clinging" to his projections because they are terrified of uncertainty and Mitt Romney's ineffable momentum.

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As the use of Twitter has exploded in the 2012 campaign, coupled with more expansive use of Facebook and other social networks, the rumble of extreme partisans propagating strange conspiracy theories is getting louder.

Those silly partisans and their silly conspiracy theories! The resolutely nonpartisan and hence perfectly clear-eyed reporters at Politico have your number. You are all claiming that bad things will happen if the "other guy" wins the election, when everyone knows that no matter who wins things will be fine, that is what American history has taught us. (??) Also conspiracy theories spread because of "Twitter" and "Facebook." (???)

Hey, what is the best way to make sure this column reads like it was written by an old person a decade ago and then buried underground until this week? Something like this, probably:

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vScientific issues can be just as vulnerable to misinformation campaigns. Plenty of people still believe that vaccines cause autism and that human-caused climate change is a hoax. Science has thoroughly debunked these myths, but the misinformation persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. Straightforward efforts to combat the lies may backfire as well. A paper published on September 18 in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (PSPI) says that efforts to fight the problem frequently have the opposite effect.

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At the Weekly Standard, Daniel Halper gets very sarcastic with Politico, as does the Weasel Zipper person. Conservatives on Twitter are similarly unimpressed. The "Fox Nation" headline: "Left-Wing Politico Calls Biden a 'Sex Symbol.'"

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Within hours, the White House had contacted Politico (without solicitation) to confirm but downplay the report.

The Free Beacon suggested that the hack may have compromised sensitive information that could be used "during a future conflict to intercept presidential communications, locate the president for targeting purposes, or disrupt strategic command and control by the president to U.S. forces in both the United States and abroad."

However, the White House volunteered to Politico that no harm had been done:

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They explicitly say so. The new story is about Mitt Romney's new plan to rescue his campaign with more personal appearances and ads. (His previous strategy, I guess, was just not do any campaigning.) At the end of the story there is a recap of bad things that have happened to the Romney campaign over the last 10 days, divided into "What Does Matter" and "What Doesn't Matter." Here is my favorite entry in "What Doesn't Matter":

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As Politico's Maggie Haberman reported Thursday:

The spot is the work of a c4 called Secure America Now - which, thanks to its tax status, doesn't have to disclose its donors.

A Republican involved with the project said its airing in Miami, West Palm Beach and Ft. Myers. The flight is ultimately going to be $1 million, the official said - a media-tracking source said about $400,000 has been placed so far. Those markets house some of the state's largest Jewish communities.

The ad, setting Bibi's apocalyptic predictions against ominous music, makes no reference to Mitt Romney, for whom the Israeli P.M. showed support earlier this year but "distanced himself a bit from" during U.S. television appearances last weekend, noted Haberman.

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Allen and VandeHei, Politico's mascot and co-founder, have yet another one of their bizarre, needlessly lengthy (especially needless because they just repeat the same points over and over again ...) news articles that are also lengthy throat-clearing "state of the race" pieces that rehash the very obvious observations of D.C. reporters covering this race. (Some of these articles also double as opinion pieces about how mean and unfair the press and the Democrats are being to Mitt Romney.)

So, sure, it is at this point a truism that this election resembles 2004 in that the incumbent president has an advantage on "national security" issues and the challenger is perceived as rich and out of touch. So obviously the Democrats are now doing exactly what they accused the Other Side of doing, before:

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Also: Newt Gingrich's wife, Callista, has a new children's book coming out, and it was more challenging to write than her earlier children's book. Newt's next book is about George Washington. (It is a novel.)

Newt Gingrich enjoyed Paul Ryan's speech, but he wishes Paul Ryan had said "Mr. President, she did built that" after he introduced his mom.

Here is an actual question Mike Allen -- Politico superstar reporter -- asked Newt Gingrich: "You have always been the ideas machine in the Republican Party. Are you worried that now that's going to be Paul Ryan?" Newt Gingrich, for the record, thinks there is room for two ideas machines in the Republican Party.

Here's another actual question Mike Allen asked Newt Gingrich: "You recently made a very fundamental change in your life: You switched to an iPhone from a BlackBerry." Wait, sorry, that's not a thing Mike Allen asked Newt Gingrich. That's just a thing Mike Allen said to Newt Gingrich while he was interviewing him.

Mike Allen makes around a quarter of a million dollars a year.

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According to Allen and Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei, Tim Pawlenty is definitely going to be the running mate unless the prior conventional wisdom turns out to have been correct and it's still Rob Portman. (It's probably still Rob Portman.) Romney's "team" loves that Pawlenty is ... a guy, who doesn't have anything specifically wrong with him. This is also why various pundits thought he was the "dark horse" candidate for the nomination, until it turned out that no one, anywhere, could come up with any reason to vote for Tim Pawlenty. He was also almost John McCain's running mate in 2008, but John McCain wanted to pick someone more interesting.

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The piece is just factually wrong. First of all, the Project for Excellence in Journalism tracked Obama-Romney media coverage this year and found that the president received far more negative coverage than Romney did. GQ's Devin Gordon took apart VandeHei and Allen here. He said everything I wanted to about the piece – most notably, the Times took the lead in reporting on Obama's ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, starting with Jodi Kantor's piece in April, 2007. Gordon found 2,950 references to Wright in the Times archives. Even if Gordon's math is off by a factor of 10, that's a lot of coverage.

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He intuitively understood how the media work even if he needed to invent a grand conspiracy to explain the motivations of its primary actors. He knew that if the press felt it had missed a major story from an unexpected source, it would quickly rush to be the first to publicize further material from that source in the future. He learned this from Matt Drudge, who really did become the de facto "assignment editor" of the political press following his publication of Michael Isikoff's axed Lewinsky story. The parallel right-wing press has been in existence for years, and the early conservative blogosphere organized itself around blogs from people like Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds, but Breitbart was an expert in forcing their obsessions into the "mainstream."

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Allen, a weird guy who refuses to, say, name his hobbies on the record to a man writing a friendly profile of him, writes what is basically a morning email newsletter full of links to various political stories, and this newsletter basically "sets the agenda" for the people who decide what constitutes important political news at the cable news channels. It is seriously 90 percent capsule summaries of day-old news articles, and what original Allen-added content there is is usually pretty banal. (When it's not aggravatingly stupid.) Sometimes he just randomly makes things up, for fun, and then those things become major national news stories for like a day, which is certainly good for Politico's traffic.

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The former Florida congressman and possibly attorney of some kind followed up his unremarkable political career by becoming a wildly successful moderate TV talker. ("Wildly successful" in terms of monetary compensation and publicity -- his show is watched by less than half the number of people who watch Fox's daily televised morning train wreck "Fox & Friends.") Joe's supposed to be some sort of maverick because he's not a doctrinaire Republican (anymore), but what he is is a totally doctrinaire member of the moderate Beltway political establishment.

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