In his postscript to the 1994 edition of Out of Order, Patterson said that, after the ’92 election, the media for the first time had taken its negative bias from the campaign straight into its coverage of the administration. Now, he said, a President’s news coverage “depends less on his actual performance in office than on the media’s cynical bias. The press nearly always magnifies the bad and underplays the good.” For example, the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs said that, on my handling of domestic policy issues, the coverage was 60 percent negative, mostly focusing on broken campaign commitments, even though, as Patterson said, I had kept “dozens” of my campaign commitments and that I was a President who “should have acquired a reputation for fulfilling his promises,” in part by prevailing in Congress on 88 percent of contested votes, a mark bettered only by Eisenhower in 1953 and Johnson in 1965. Patterson concluded that the negative coverage drove down not only my approval rating but also public support for my programs, including health care, and thus “imposed extraordinary costs on the Clinton presidency and the national interest.”
In the summer of 1994, Thomas Patterson’s book helped me to see that there might be nothing I could do to change the press coverage. If that was true, I had to learn to handle it better. Mack McLarty had never sought the chief of staff’s job, and Leon Panetta was willing to take on the challenge. He had already built a record at OMB that would be hard to improve on—our first two budgets were the first in seventeen years to be adopted by Congress on time; the budgets guaranteed three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since Truman was President; and perhaps most impressive, they brought the first reduction in discretionary domestic spending in twenty-five years, while still providing increases for education, Head Start, job training, and new technologies. Perhaps as chief of staff, Leon could more clearly communicate what we had done and were trying to accomplish for America. I named him, and appointed Mack counselor to the President, with the job description he had recommended.
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Al and I, on the South Lawn, announcing the elimination of forklifts of government regulations, part of our Reinventing Government initiative