https://fallows.substack.com/p/election-countdown-198-days-to-go
Also among his problems was a media-herd obsession similar to what befell Howard Dean. Through his career, Graham had always carried little notebooks with him. He would frequently take them out to compose precise handwritten records of every single thing that was occurring. What he had for lunch, what someone told him, what he told other people he would do.1 By the time he ran for president, Graham had more than 4,000 of these small, neat books, which he’d kept in careful order.
In much press coverage from that era, the notebooks became shorthand for the “wacky” factor about Bob Graham. A sample 2003 article in the Washington Post will give you the idea (below2). For the political press his wackiness and “eccentricity” became the counterpart to Dean’s "scream,” and Hillary Clinton’s emails. They became the Graham meme, as we’d put it today. What a weirdo!