NEWS ANALYSIS : Media Focus on Insiders Misses Big Picture : Politics: Blaming Clinton’s ups and downs on Gergen and other image-makers ignores the effect of the President’s policies on the public.

By mid-January, old Washington hands could sense a little blood.

The White House was mishandling questions about President Clinton’s part in the Whitewater land deal, the press said. He also was said to be losing steam on health care. The magic aura of momentum was ebbing again.

Soon some senior aides had unsheathed their long knives; many pointed at the President’s communications guru. “Clinton aides observe with some irritation that David Gergen was slow to defend his boss last month as the Whitewater story” and others gathered force, Time magazine said.

Then in late January, the President’s approval rating with the public rose to its highest point ever. Had the White House communications team shrewdly and suddenly turned matters around? Had the President’s handlers managed to stage the right photo opportunities and craft the right sound bites just in time?

Not quite. The sometimes fine, sometimes fumbling course of White House communications more likely reveals another truth about politics: Handlers, spin doctors and message meisters usually make only a marginal difference. The perceived strengths and weaknesses of Clinton’s White House have almost everything to do with Clinton, his policies and the economy and much less to do with the subtle strengths and weaknesses of Gergen and other White House image-makers.

“The same thing happened with (Ronald) Reagan and (George) Bush,” said media and political analyst Michael Robinson. Particularly once a President has established a relationship with the public, Robinson said, “the variables of war and economics matter. ‘Insiderism’ doesn’t, and the idea that (Clinton) is losing momentum because of health care or Whitewater is the kind of politically immature thing you should expect from the Washington press corps.”

Implicit in much of the coverage of what goes on behind the scenes at the White House is the cynical perspective that what politicians actually do is not very important and what matters more is the image they project, their use of the media, the skills of their communications team.

It is government as a game of virtual reality, with the public seen as a passive group more sensitive to how the President looks on television than how government policies affect their lives. And Gergen, the New York Times Magazine declared in a cover story in late October, is the “perfect flower” and “high priest” of “the sacred faith” in image.

This fascination with political insiders is not new--”The Selling of the President, 1968” became a bestseller a quarter of a century ago--but the idea has reached a new apogee.

In Clinton’s first 100 days, for instance, much of the press criticism of the new President concerned whether he was managing the press well enough. And the month after Gergen joined the White House, the communications veteran of three Republican administrations was the focus of scores of stories in the country’s major papers, wire services and weekly news magazines.

Do the image-makers really matter this much? Consider the press’ three major mood swings toward Clinton, spring, fall and winter.

Through June, the Center for Media and Public Affairs reported, only a third of the evaluations of Clinton on the three TV networks’ nightly news shows were positive, compared with 55% positive for George Bush’s first year. Public approval of Clinton fell in most polls from nearly 60% in March to 37% in June.

That’s when Gergen was hired and evidence suggests that communications strategy became important. Reporters soon found the White House more responsive to their questions and that helped the Administration get its story out.

In the next month, coverage grew more favorable--network coverage became 40% positive in July--and by August the President’s approval rating began rising.

Gergen was also part of the reason. “Gergen had credibility with the older, senior journalists in town, and there was no one else in this White House who did,” said a senior Administration official who generally does not like Gergen.

But Clinton also had a series of policy successes during this period. He made a well-received choice for the Supreme Court, handled himself competently on a trip to Tokyo and secured passage of his budget by Congress. In September he delivered a half-improvised, widely acclaimed speech on health care to Congress, and afterward his approval rating rose above 50% for the first time in months.

Then, in late fall and winter, came another turn in fortune. The media perceived that the White House was losing momentum on health care. Network coverage in October slipped again to just 30% positive. By November, the President’s approval rating began to slip again.

Was this a communications problem, a failure to set out a carefully planned media assault to sell the program?

In part, yes. Clinton delivered his well-received speech too soon, weeks before the Administration was able to send a health care bill to Congress, three months before Harold Ickes, hired to head up the issue on the White House staff, was able to begin work.

But more than that, losing momentum was inevitable as Americans began to debate the President’s proposal and find elements they did not like.

“Health care was a struggle for definition,” said Democratic strategist Robert Shrum. “The debate went from what the middle class gets to what the middle class loses. It has to play itself out.”

Then, in December and January came allegations concerning Clinton’s role in the controversial Whitewater resort development deal. The press began asking why the White House hesitated in agreeing to hand over all of the First Family’s Whitewater documents, then in accepting the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the affair.

Again, there were various theories--that the First Family has something to hide, that the President was distracted by the death of his mother, that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and several senior officials resisted full disclosure because no allegations of actual wrongdoing had been leveled at the President.

The White House response to press inquiries--that the questions were in bad taste, were partisan or even represented, as Gergen put it, a kind of political “cannibalism”--struck many in Washington as evasive nonsense.

“There ain’t going to be no health care campaign if they don’t get Whitewater out of the way,” said former Clinton gubernatorial chief of staff and occasional damage-control adviser Betsey Wright. “Right now it is very difficult for the White House to be heard on policy.”

How then, to account for the new opinion polls that came out within the next few days? Through December and mid-January, the President’s approval rating surged as high as 60%.

A close look suggests that Clinton’s rise now, as his dips earlier, have to do with what the public cares about.

Gergen, for one, argued that communications strategy is most important for a President or candidate in the beginning, “when an individual is just being introduced to the American public and they do not have the basis of making any judgments yet.”

The early press coverage of Clinton’s White House--his problems with appointments, his $200 haircut, the bungling of the way a scandal at the White House travel office was handled, his compromises over the budget--hurt because the public still did not know if Clinton was up to the job. Gays in the military, the first divisive policy issue to arise after Clinton’s inauguration, hurt because the public had no other sense of his real priorities.

Despite the press coverage, Clinton’s stock is rising now, Gergen argued, because people have developed a clearer sense of his capacity for the job and of where he wants to take the country. That in turn has enabled Clinton to gain credit for the economy’s recent strong performance, he said.

“People are saying: ‘At least he’s trying to line up the country’s problems and do something about them. I may not agree on a lot of what he is trying to do, but he is not in denial about the country’s problems,’ ” Gergen said.

History bears Gergen out. In the mid-1980s, for instance, Robinson and the Media Analysis Project at George Washington University found that network coverage of Ronald Reagan was overwhelmingly negative. During the first 100 days of 1983, when the economy was emerging from recession, network television coverage was negative by a ratio of 22 to 1. Yet Reagan’s popularity during that period continued to rise.

The public, in short, took its cue from the GDP rather than from CBS or ABC.

“Once the economy picked up and people knew Reagan, it didn’t make a difference if he fell asleep, if he goofed a line, or if he told stories that drove people nuts or even took positions they didn’t agree with,” Gergen said.

Media strategist Mandy Grunwald, a key outside adviser to the President, said she believes that the concerns of the press and the public are often fundamentally different and coincide only occasionally.

“I think most Americans want to know now whether Clinton is taking action in the right direction: Is he working on the people’s business and getting somewhere?” she said. The press, by contrast, focuses on how this White House compares with its recent predecessors, particularly in its internal workings.

Even many Republican media experts said they think that Clinton’s swings in momentum have mostly to do with policy, not style. “Their problem on health care is that they made the issue one of providing care for everyone rather than of reducing cost,” said a senior official in the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Although Robinson said he is skeptical that the public cares much about the ideological theories behind policies, some analysts say they believe that Clinton’s stock is rising now because he is emphasizing issues--such as crime and welfare reform--on which his posture is less liberal than the Democratic mainstream.

And some analysts say they believe that managing the imagery in the media has become much more difficult now than it was during Reagan’s presidency in the early 1980s.

With the proliferation of cable television outlets and radio talk shows, the interpretations of the networks or the New York Times matter less. No longer can the President manage the media by massaging the three networks and a few newspapers. In Clinton’s White House, unlike Reagan’s, Gergen said, work does not stop when the network news shows begin.

One of the keys to the Republican communications strategy, for instance, was sending out surrogates--party members from around the country--to flood radio and TV stations with the White House message.

That may no longer work, said Robert M. Teeter, the veteran Republican pollster and Bush’s campaign chairman in 1992. In the age of talk shows and cable, he said, “the candidates are going to have to carry the message for themselves.”

Especially in this environment, people have to sense their lives are improving. “You can sell snake oil,” Gergen said, “only for so long.”