Pilgrim's regress.

• Author: Wooster, Martin Morse
• Position: Pres. Bill Clinton's task of selling positive government

President Clinton's future depends on selling big government to a leery electorate.

AS PRESIDENT CLINTON CELEBRATed his first year in office, some journalists admired his achievements, while others were skeptical. But for many journalists living inside the Beltway, President Clinton was not just a politician--he was a hero.

Journalists call a story a "beat sweetener" if it's meant to please a source or boost the ego of a powerful person. There were far too many writers whipping up sticky feasts of love in 1993, hoping that, if they were very good, Bill Clinton would pat them on the head and Hillary Rodham Clinton would reward them with a homemade cookie. While some writers, such as The Washingtonian's Barbara Matusow, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, and Time's Margaret Carlson, were content to deliver lollipops to the Clinton camp, The New Yorker's Sidney Blumenthal wanted to deliver the entire candy store to the presidential partners.

Blumenthal was in an odd position. He had made his career as a liberal pit bull who saw conservatives and Perotistas as juicy raw meat. When attacking right-wingers, Blumenthal wouldn't usually stop until the bones were picked clean.

But now the Republicans were out of power, and diminutive billionaire Ross Perot had disappeared from the national political radar. Worse still, Blumenthal's good friend, Bill Clinton, was in the White House--and under attack. The revelations of the Arkansas state troopers had made the president's private parts fodder for comedians, and the smoldering scandal of the Whitewater Development Corporation threatened to burn the president, the First Lady, and several other White House staffers. Something had to be done!

So in the January 24 New Yorker, Blumenthal concocted a beat sweetener so sugary it threatened to give the magazine's readers diabetes. In his effort to become Clinton's best friend in the press, Blumenthal pulled out all the stops. He made comparisons between the president and Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Woodrow Wilson. Showing his mastery of history, Blumenthal wrote that "Clinton had the worst first week of any president since William Henry Harrison, who caught pneumonia while delivering a long inaugural speech and died a month later. Clinton suffered from attorney general nominees with nanny problems and from visceral opposition to gays in the military."

My favorite passage in Blumenthal's article described Bill Clinton's goals. The...