These colorful tidbits aren’t trivial. The detail that Al Gore uses a Blackberry handheld computer while George W. Bush takes sparing notes in a large scrawl with a thick Sharpie pen contrasts the two men’s styles better than any lengthy analysis I could write. Digging for these nuggets–or goodies as one of my editors sometimes calls them–is how I spend a whole lot of my time. In fact, during the campaign, a TV producer friend of mine started calling me “Nugget Girl.” (To be fair, I dubbed him “Element Boy” since in TV land “nuggets” are called “elements.”) But as in demand as they are, not all the nuggets I gather make it into a story. Here are a few I found while reporting on Lynne Cheney a couple of weeks back that I think are illustrative. I call them “Nuggets from a Marriage”:

Nugget 1: Dick and Lynne Cheney might be Washington’s consummate power couple, but they are also doting grandparents. The other weekend, soon after they moved into their Naval Observatory residence, they invited their granddaughters for a sleepover. It proved to be a bigger adventure then anyone anticipated. That night, 3-year-old Elizabeth showed just how big of a girl she is by going to the potty all by herself. All went well until she tried to flush the toilet, which has a button on top of the tank. “Push the button!” the vice president and his wife called out from bed. “I is pushing it!” their granddaughter responded. “Push it again,” they urged her.

“I is!” she insisted, but nothing happened. Nothing until the Secret Service stormed up to the bedroom and pounded on the door to check if the vice president was OK. Turns out little Elizabeth had been pushing the “panic” button.

Nugget 2: All you need to know about Lynne Cheney, one of her old friends told me, is that she was a champion baton twirler as a girl back in Wyoming. “That is where she learned how to please a crowd,” the friend explained. By contrast, Dick Cheney-pronounced Chee-ney in their hometown of Casper-wasn’t much of a showboat when they started dating in high school. The big thing to do on the weekends was cruise back and forth between the two A&W root beer stores. He wanted none of it. Mrs. Cheney jokes that his refusal to cruise was an early source of frustration. She’s always been more public than he. She’s a better public speaker, though the diminutive second lady often has to stand on a box or yank the podium down to reach the microphone. And she’s an inspired campaigner. It was her idea to introduce her often inscrutable and uncommunicative husband on the campaign trail. She’d spin yarns about his youth and brag about his career in a way he never could. She even got him to ditch the suit and wear a Green Bay Packers jacket while they were stumping in the Midwest. But he drew the line at the cheese wedge hat in Cheesehead country.

Nugget 3: The conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute has never been hotter-and it has Lynne Cheney to thank. Republican Washington brushed off the minks, polished up the patent leather and turned out en force to celebrate AEI at its biggest annual dinner recently. Sixteen hundred glittering guests descended on the Washington Hilton; the ballroom was teeming with such paragons of the intellectual right as Robert Bork, Dinesh D’Souza and Charles Murray. The dinner’s honoree: Justice Clarence Thomas, who gave a lecture heavy with bitterness about his contentious confirmation process a decade ago. But the night belonged to one of AEI’s star scholars: Lynne Cheney. As her husband leaned back comfortably in his chair, the second lady buzzed around the room. She chatted with GOP strategist Karl Rove. Jack Kemp draped his arm around her. Ken Starr waited in the reception line that formed around the It Couple. Back at AEI’s offices, the biggest change is that Secret Service agents now stand guard on Mrs. Cheney’s floor. “Author returning to office,” one agent said into his wrist while I was waiting in the lobby to speak with Mrs. Cheney a few weeks ago. Her secret service code name is Author. Her husband, an avid fly fisherman, is Angler. So much for secret code names.