Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Farm Forecast -- Aid, With 32.3 Billion In Scattered Dollars, by Jonathan Rauch (June 27, 2000) In 1986, Congress paid farmers $25.8 billion, but conservative Republicans have left that record in the dust. Legal Affairs: Why We Should All Be Grateful to Janet Reno, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (June 27, 2000) Reno wasn't just protecting Clinton and Gore from independent counsels. She was protecting the country. Political Pulse: OK, Al, Who Are You Today?, by William Schneider (June 27, 2000) The Gore campaign seems to be suffering from multiple personality disorder. Legal Affairs: Cabbies, Cops, Pizza Deliveries, and Racial Profiling, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (June 20, 2000) Racial profiling by police is not worth the costs. Racial profiling by cabbies is another matter. Media: The Signed-On Majority, by William Powers (June 20, 2000) Think those political Web sites will help you form your decision about the next President? Think again. Political Pulse: High-Tech Queries, Slow-Mo Answers, by William Schneider (June 20, 2000) Things have changed a lot since Al Gore invented the Internet. More from National Journal. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.

Media: Too True to Mention A New York Times Magazine writer abandoned political "balance" and revealed his personal beliefs. It was great by William Powers June 27, 2000 The piece that changed my week, the one I can't stop thinking about, arrived quietly. The front page of the Sunday New York Times gave no hint that this piece waited inside. No one told me to read it, no mentioner mentioned it. I found it by accident after 10 minutes of fruitless page-snapping, when I was about to call it a day, mediawise, and step out back for a lie-down in the sun. A small headline on the front bottom of the NYT's magazine section stopped me: "James Bennet: Marketing Hillary by the Numbers." True, stories about the marketing of political candidates are not just old hat, they're dinosaur-fossil hat. Once, conscientious citizens were shocked by the packaging of candidates, the manipulation of their images. But we're all cynics now, long past worrying about the backroom engineers of mass political sentiment -- ad people and pollsters. They're not even backroom any more, these people: They go on the talk shows, tooting off about which candidates they've programmed this season, which elections they've massaged and tilted. They get rich having their way with our politics, and we lie back and let them. But having been cynicized long ago, shocked into political adulthood by a 10th-grade history teacher who gave me a copy of that memorable 1968 book The Selling of the President, by Joe McGinniss, I have a sentimental attachment to political-marketing stories. Sometimes I still hope one will come along and wake us up, prompt us to go out and drub every last candidate owned by the engineers. But then, that would mean drubbing every last candidate. Bennet's piece is about Mark Penn, the Democratic pollster who has long instructed President Clinton on which opinions and positions he's allowed to have publicly and which are forbidden. The President apparently considers Penn a genius. Clinton calls in the pollster regularly to learn what the latest polls say, to listen closely to his numbers, much as a sock listens closely to the wind. And now, Bennet reports, the other Clinton is taking her stage directions from Mark Penn, too. The pollster has his people in Denver calling the citizens of New York to find out which words from Hillary Clinton would make them like her, and senatorial candidate Clinton is mouthing those words. Penn is, according to Bennet, "the most influential adviser to her campaign." He is "creating her message and testing its effectiveness." He is sitting beside her at campaign strategy meetings in the White House Map Room. Having made his name helping sell pizza for Pizza Hut, gasoline for Texaco, and rental cars for Avis, among other products, Penn is now "guiding Hillary Clinton to work up her own product line," specifically the stances and policies that will persuade the voters of New York to choose her over Rep. Rick A. Lazio as their next U.S. Senator. These are mostly small local policies of the pothole-filling class, because these are the policies that Mark Penn has deemed most politically effective. To any close student of politics, the Mark Penn story is hardly news. He and the equally attractive Dick Morris came to prominence when the Democratic Party was reeling from its defeat in the 1994 midterm elections. They were the President's new gurus, demographic confidence men who plunged the idealists of the Clinton circle (remember them?) into despair. What's news, to me anyway, is that Penn's influence has persisted and grown. Bennet portrays Penn's firm as the Svengali of the global power class, using the hypnosis of polls and market research to influence not just the Clintons, but Bill Gates, AOL, Citibank, and the heads of untold foreign governments. One of the great qualities of this piece is the way it takes Penn's role in one campaign -- albeit the most interesting of all campaigns -- and endows it with cosmic consequence. But the main reason this piece changed my week is that it belongs to one of political journalism's most exotic species -- the passionate, reported essay. Often attempted, rarely pulled off, this kind of piece requires two things: 1) a deep factual grounding in the subject, and 2) a willingness by the writer to abandon the safety of "balanced" political writing and reveal his most earnest personal beliefs, often at the risk of embarrassment. Having covered both Clintons up close in recent years, Bennet had point No. 1 in spades. And he beautifully makes the leap to No. 2, beginning with a brazen move early on: "For years now, aides to the Clintons have insisted that they use polls not to decide which policies to support but to learn how to persuade others to share their positions -- not to follow, in other words, but to lead. It's not true. They use polls for both purposes, and that is why to understand the state of American politics and government you need to know about Mark Penn." It's not true. When was the last time you read that simple declaration in a piece of political reportage from a major media outlet? Bennet's passion, controlled but unmistakable, is the backbone of the piece. He is indignant, and if you share his belief that something essential is at stake in the Mark Penn story, by the end of the piece you'll be indignant, too. In the days since it ran, the piece has had no perceptible pickup among the mentioning class. But then, the best pieces rarely do. In that crowd, certain truths are just unmentionable. What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.