Word: schoening
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...Yellow Oval Room of the White House residence, Clinton had been convening weekly strategy sessions that included members of the team. The meetings were small and secret, attended by Clinton, Morris, Gore, Schoen, Ickes, chief of staff Leon Panetta, senior adviser George Stephanopoulos and then deputy chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Schoen had persuaded a reluctant Morris to let Penn get involved, and he was beginning to attend. Penn and Schoen were disturbed to find that the President, a commanding figure, was not in control of his White House. The liberal institution was running itself. The White House staff...
...client was the President. Morris asked Schoen if he was interested in doing some polling for the White House. It was an offer no pollster could refuse. Schoen was also eager to work with Morris, who had been a mentor to him. In high school Schoen had canvassed races for Morris on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Schoen and his partner, Penn, who had attended Harvard together, later distinguished themselves as New Democratic consultants and pollsters for Mayor Ed Koch of New York City, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Evan Bayh of Indiana. They had also polled...
Morris wanted Schoen but was wary of Penn, a large and rumpled man with an absentminded brilliance and a disheveled charm. Penn, who can work wonders with a laptop so long as he hasn't left it behind in a cab, could bring a nonpolitical, outside-the-box perspective to the team. He had been polling mainly for corporate clients, helping AT&T, for example, test TV spots during its corporate war against MCI. But Morris didn't really want him. A few years before, Penn had shot down some big-think Morris ideas during a meeting with a client...
...Schoen and Morris met privately with the President for the first time in February 1995. "I found him somewhat withdrawn," recalls Schoen. "There was a sense that the air had been taken out of him." Clinton asked for Schoen's analysis of the situation. "I remember you from our Arkansas work," Schoen told him. "Our polling then showed you as a middle-of-the-road Democrat. Now you have to get back to the center." He wasn't saying anything the President didn't know. Since November, Morris had been whispering in Clinton's ear about "riding the wave...
...Schoen could see that the Clinton-Morris relationship was evolving but that the President was still on guard. He wasn't completely committing. "I don't want to read about you in the press," he told Morris and Schoen. "I'm sick and tired of consultants' getting famous at my expense. Any story that comes out during the campaign undermines my candidacy." Morris was brilliant, Schoen knew, but erratic. There was an excellent chance he would flame out. So when Morris turned to Schoen for help in assembling the message team, Schoen recruited one that could survive without Morris...