Playing By the Numbers

By JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON

WITH SUCCESS IN TODAY'S POLITICS hinging on how well a message transmits, Presidents have come to depend more and more on savvy pollsters to help them connect with the public. Still, relying too heavily on polls can appear to be unprincipled acquiescence to public opinion, as George Bush found out. Bill Clinton promised to be different. To prove it, he laid out a detailed agenda during the campaign and pledged that the whims of public sentiment would not determine his policies. Nevertheless, when it comes to polls, Clinton is more hooked than his predecessors.

Polls are the reason why both Clinton and the First Lady will go back into campaign mode this week, visiting nine cities between them in just five days in a blitz of speeches, staged events and electronic town-hall meetings. The Clintons won't be alone. By the time Congress returns from its two-week recess next Monday, about 35 Cabinet members and other Administration officials will have taken part in 70 health-care events across the country. The goal behind this burst of activity: to hammer home five simple points about the President's health-care plan in language many Americans have not heard before.

What was the problem? Earlier this year, the Administration's internal polls showed that the health-care sales pitch wasn't working. What the President had been saying since September about his reform plan had done as much to confuse the public as inform it. And confusion had only helped his opponents. Thus, largely absent in the new White House lexicon will be references to "universal coverage," "insurance-purchasing alliances" and "employer mandates." In their place, Clinton is using the phrases "guaranteed private insurance," "real insurance reform" and "health benefits guaranteed at work." The reason: the new phrases were test-marketed in public-opinion research by Stanley Greenberg, the outside consultant who runs the most comprehensive White House polling operation in history. Greenberg, say White House officials, discovered that Clinton's plan wins higher approval ratings when the new, less jargony terms are used to describe it.

In the President's first year in office, the Democratic National Committee paid Greenberg more than $1.9 million for national surveys, tracking polls, focus groups and consulting services, most of it on Clinton's behalf. That compares with the roughly $400,000 the Republican National Committee shelled out to Bush's pollsters in 1989, some of which was for polling in the 1988 campaign. Even Richard Wirthlin, who as Ronald Reagan's pollster was considered to have almost mystical influence over the White House, didn't take the public's temperature for his boss as often as Greenberg does for Clinton.

The extent of Greenberg's work surprises even Democrats. "That's a lot of polling," says Peter Hart, a political consultant and polltaker who doesn't work for the White House. "Stan must be asking 10,000 questions a year on Bill Clinton." For all its clients combined, Hart's firm asks about 25,000 questions in a year. And when Clinton delivers a major speech, Greenberg sets up groups of people who watch and register their reactions on a hand-held device called a dial-a-meter.

The real issue is not how much polling the Administration does but how closely Clinton bases his decisions on polling results. Fred Steeper, one of Bush's pollsters, believes that some of Clinton's most popular, and more moderate, policies are driven by Greenberg's surveys and focus groups. "Things like a two-year limit on welfare and three-strikes-and-you're-out on crime, we're all picking those up in our research," says Steeper. "Because the country is still of a conservative bent, the Clinton Administration is finding our ((Republican)) agendas and trying to take them away."

But Clinton adviser Paul Begala, who works closely with Greenberg, insists that polls don't dictate policy. "This Administration uses polls as feedback, not to chart a course," he protests. "Polls tell us whether what we're doing to communicate is working." And as an activist President who won office with less than half the vote, Clinton has even more reason to fear losing touch with public sentiment.

The change in the way the White House has handled the Whitewater affair can also be traced in part to polls. As a series of negative disclosures and two high-level resignations rocked the White House last month, Administration officials started telling reporters that most Americans had no idea that Clinton agreed to the appointment of a special counsel and was cooperating fully with his investigation. How did the officials know this? Greenberg told them. Not surprisingly, the President and his aides now go to great lengths to stress their policy of "full disclosure" on Whitewater.

On some issues, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and gays in the military, Clinton has acted against significant public opposition. But his approach to passing major legislation like health-care reform has resembled a permanent campaign, with Greenberg probing the U.S. to find out what Americans want to hear and then putting the most felicitous phrases on the President's tongue. One thing is certain: if Clinton ever wonders whether the public thinks he is too reliant on polls, he'll ask Stan Greenberg to find out.

With reporting by Ingrid Schmidt/Washington