Word: gergen
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Guinier's demise was doubly demoralizing, coming on the heels of David Gergen's appointment, which horrified many of Clinton's eager young staff members. Gergen, back from a vacation in Bermuda that included a boat ride with Ross Perot, spent part of his first full day at work wandering the halls and hanging around the takeout window of the White House mess, greeting his colleagues like a maitre d'. In his first meeting with the communications staff, Gergen tried irony to defuse suspicion among the Young Turks, identifying nearby offices as the old haunts of former colleagues like William...
...Gergen's arrival will bring turmoil in that key indicator of the White House pecking order: office assignments. "Now it really gets ugly," a staff member predicted. The joke was that the big tent going up on the South Lawn for the President's 25th Georgetown class reunion last week was actually a temporary shelter for homeless senior staff. On Saturday, chief of staff Thomas ("Mack") McLarty decreed that Gergen will move into the office of former communications director George Stephanopoulos, where the very fashionable shade of gray paint has barely had time to dry. Stephanopoulos, now a senior policy...
...mission that Gergen undertakes, to help move Clinton toward the political center, began to take shape in late May, after the accumulated effect of issues ranging from gays in the military to Clinton's tax-increase package had persuaded Americans that the New Democrat they had elected was really an old-fashioned liberal. Even the moderates within the Administration were alarmed. Says a White House official: "The Bill Clinton I've seen over the past four months is not the man I voted...
...Administration has not meant the departure of liberals, since Clinton brings in new players on top of the old, a process Bush practiced so faithfully it became known derisively as "composting." Moreover, liberals ranging all the way from twentysomething staff members to Hillary Rodham Clinton are unlikely to let Gergen steer the President too far into conservative country. "Gergen has mounted a coup," said a former Bush official, "but there are a lot of rebels at large who are armed and dangerous...
...while politicos may be happy to engage in serial reinterpretation of the Clinton Administration, the American people are not likely to be. The President's all too public search for political identity suggests a weakness of conviction, inviting the most unfortunate comparison of all: to George Bush. While Gergen was predicting last week that Clinton had got in touch with his inner President -- "reaching deep inside himself to find what he believed was right" -- in pulling the Guinier nomination, an invitation designed by artist Peter Max to a fund raiser was landing in the mailboxes of hundreds of Democratic givers...