Congressional Correspondent

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Two things to know about Karen Tumulty, who was one of the main reporters on this week's cover story about minority whip Newt Gingrich -- and who wrote the accompanying story about House Speaker Tom Foley -- are that in her apprentice years as a journalist she acquired an MBA from Harvard and once covered a cow- milking contest by entering it. Plenty of reporters prove their tenacity by tracking down politicians in rest rooms, coaxing home numbers from prosecutors or outdoing fire fighters on lost sleep. Tumulty has done that; but her toughness reflects a quiet ability to get to the bottom of something, whether it is the cost of managed care or the lactation of bovines.

During her past 13 years as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, that quality often put her a step ahead of the competition -- a fact that was not lost on our Washington bureau chief, Dan Goodgame. "Whatever the next chapter was going to be, Karen was writing it first," he says. So last month Dan lured her away to cover Congress for TIME.

Tumulty knows the region the Republicans claim as their base. Her father was a military officer who moved often, but in the family's travels, she says, "we hit Texas four times because we knew the local Congressman." In high school in Austin, Texas, having failed to make the Tex-Anns drill team, she stumbled across a primitive form of journalism -- yearbook writing ("I needed something to do in fifth period"). She went on to get a journalism degree at the University of Texas in Austin, then worked for two years on the San Antonio Light. After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1981, she joined the Los Angeles Times, for which she covered everything from the oil industry to the Iran-contra affair to Bob Kerrey's 1992 campaign for the presidency. She interrupted her campaign stint to have Nicholas, now 2, with husband Paul Richter, a White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

Last week Tumulty was back on the road, following Foley from Walla Walla to Spokane and catching up with Gingrich in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Georgia. She has known both men for 10 years. Watching Foley regain strength in the waning days of his campaign reminded her that "for all the anger out there, the vast majority of incumbents will get re-elected." As for Gingrich, she says, he is a good lesson in the perils of political under-estimation. "Just five years ago, he was a backbencher the Democrats thought they could dismiss as a gnat."