The best reporting on the Clinton administration is appearing only as the president prepares to depart. For example, the morning of New Year's Eve, the Washington Post's lead story was a superb review, by White House reporter John F. Harris, of the unprecedented extent to which the Clinton presidency was dependent upon public opinion polling. "No previous president read public opinion surveys with the same hypnotic intensity" as Clinton, Harris wrote. "And no predecessor has integrated his pollster so thoroughly into the policymaking operation of his White House." That would be Mark J. Penn, who ran a private poll for Clinton "at least once a week all through the second term."
The president's defensive explanation for this obsession with public opinion numbers is already familiar: that he has used those numbers not to decide what he thought, but to help him choose the words by which he would persuade other people to think it, too. Harris bends over backwards to be fair to Clinton, and acknowledges that it's "true" the president didn't "always" do what Penn told him to.
But Harris's legwork leads him unmistakably close to an entirely opposite conclusion. According to unnamed "close associates" of Clinton, he is a man "for whom polls fill important intellectual and emotional needs." Polls were "the essential device" by which the president survived an often hostile Washington. Polls were even, it seems, the essential device by which the president survived his impeachment ordeal.
Hanging on the wall of Mark J. Penn's office, Harris reports, is a framed copy of the Washington Post from the day Clinton was acquitted. And on this Post front page, Bill Clinton has scrawled one word: "Thanks."
But no thanks, THE SCRAPBOOK would add.