To Media, White House Staff Has Become a Joke : Press corps: The issue of the moment is not the substance of Clinton’s ideas. It is that the President’s team must prove it’s not incompetent.

While they waited for the briefing to get started, the White House press corps turned to current affairs.

“I said the White House was trying to put cold cream on the story and wipe it away,” one radio correspondent says of the story he had aired that morning.

“I said the President was in need of more than just new makeup,” says the radio guy next to him.

They were talking about the Clinton Administration’s mistake of the moment, a tale about a White House aide asking a New Hampshire TV reporter to apply makeup to the President’s face before an interview. The real subject of discussion, however, was who had bragging rights to the funniest on-air line at the White House’s expense.

Some members of the press corps had more lingering issues on their minds.

“Think they can drag this travel department fiasco out another day?” a reporter from a New England paper asks another colleague.

“It’s already running on fumes,” a New York writer says skeptically.

“I don’t know,” the New Englander says in an ironic tribute to the White House public relations staff, “I think this group is capable of it.”

It doesn’t get much worse than this. To the people who cover them every day, the White House staff has become a joke, or at least the object of wicked humor.

And therein lies the problem facing the Administration and its once-vaunted communications team. The issue of the moment is no longer the substance of Clinton’s ideas, the success of his legislative package, or even an analysis of whether the latest political move is good or bad for the White House.

The issue of the moment is that the President and his staff have been put into the position of somehow proving they are not incompetent--of proving a negative.

On the weekend talk shows, Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau Chief Al Hunt declared this to be the most inept White House staff he has seen in 24 years in Washington. On Tuesday, the Journal’s White House team wrote a story speculating that a staff shake-up is imminent.

On ABC’s “Nightline” last Friday, even the usually mannerly Ted Koppel seemed incredulous at Communications Director George Stephanopoulos’ defense of the travel office fiasco, at one point wondering if the aide’s behavior indicated he was “into pain.”

“How in the world did it come to this so quickly?” wonders Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor and author of “Feeding Frenzy,” a book about politics and the press. “A very high degree of mutual hostility has developed (with the press) in record time. The President has obvious contempt for the press--not just anger. In return, many of the senior press people are furious, and all of these things matter.”

Part of what is happening is the feeling that Stephanopoulos and others in Clinton’s young Administration have too much faith in spin--the art of explaining problems away.

“George and the President are both very smart,” says one close White House colleague of Stephanopoulos, “and they think they are smart enough to talk their way out of anything.”

Historians generally believe that the Washington press corps focuses too much on the White House communications strategy. “Good press is the result of a successful Administration, not good press relations,” advises Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who studies the media.

But even Hess admits that in this case, the White House public relations work has been abysmal.