Clinton's Private Pollsters

...Vice President Al Gore, the administration's point man on the telecom bill, attended the weekly meetings that included Penn and Schoen...

...The former aide remembers "thinking it was strange, because we were trying to say this trial has nothing to do with us...

...Schoen delivered a terse "no" when asked whether he had told Clinton about his jury polling for Tucker or had shared his findings...

...Apparently many Clinton aides did not know that a regular at presidential strategy meetings was also working for a Whitewater defendant...

...The word 'Whitewater' was something they didn't want to be hearing...

...This led to the requirement that they disclose their clients, on the theory that people with so much access to the president and his aides might be in a position to do favors for their employers...

...If that is the reason, it's consistent with the kind of disturbing lack of candor . . . we've seen all along, where stories change, rationales change...

...one source reports the pollsters are still running surveys weekly, while another puts the frequency at every other week...

...But to the press, Morris himself was the story—notably the fact that he had worked for several Republicans...

...As for his work with Jim Guy Tucker's defense, Schoen bristled...

...Our level of access was precisely the same...

...The polling team's corporate and international clients, too, might have raised questions for a White House already beset by ethics troubles...

...Though Morris himself had balked at first at filing a disclosure report, he now says it's the appropriate thing to do: "Anyone who is meeting with people in the White House in ways that affect public policy ought to have to disclose other business interests that could be impelling them to make certain decisions...

...All this comes as news to Morris, who was unaware until told by this reporter that his colleagues had never filed disclosure reports...

...Knapp said that as far as he knew, White House lawyers "absolutely and unequivocally" did not change the rules in midstream out of concern that some clients would be embarrassing...

...Morris insisted on bringing along his own crew, among them Penn and Schoen, New York pollsters known for their work in foreign elections...

...They're a polling firm...

...Some insiders claim Penn has replaced Morris as the president's political guru...

...You can always insinuate...

...But another source said Clinton was aware of Schoen's endeavors on Tucker's behalf...

...White House counsel Jack Quinn nevertheless decreed in the fall of 1995 that all the new consultants with White House access would have to disclose their clients...

...The polling was apparently done with the president's blessing...

...There was no difference at all in the role I was playing and the role Mark Penn was playing...

...Early this year, when asked about their reports, the White House said that Penn and company had not been required to file because, unlike Morris, they worked on campaign matters, not on policy...

...ultimately, these four voluntarily stopped accepting corporate clients and surrendered the "hard passes" that permitted them to come and go from the White House at will...

...When the president began assembling his new team for '96, Dick Morris was in, while Carville and the rest of the Fab Four were out...

...Morris agreed to wait, then filed his report in February 1996—thinking that his colleagues were filing theirs as well...

...Some officials drew a further distinction: Only Morris had to file, they said, because only he had a hard pass, with its grant of unfettered access...

...I'm surprised," he said...

...He's available if people want to run something past him, but it's not the same aggressive role...

...At the very least, it raises the question of whether the White House, to avoid political embarrassment, kind of altered its rules on who has to disclose...

...So what...

...The pollsters' new clients include America online...

...Others insist Penn is no Dick Morris...

...He asked me to do it, and I did it, and that's that...

...Actually, Clinton's need for polls is constant and independent of elections...

...Even as he was conferring with the president, Schoen, it turns out, was doing jury-selection polling on behalf of the defense in the Whitewater trial of Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton's successor as governor of Arkansas...

...Mark doesn't impose himself that way...

...But unlike previous consultants to the Clinton White House, Penn and Schoen, along with ad men Bob Squier and Bill Knapp, have never filed financial-disclosure reports, so their extensive portfolio of corporate and foreign political clients remains shielded from public view...

...A former White House aide recalls Schoen's boasting that his polling had indicated co-defendant Jim McDougal should not take the stand because "he had zero credibility...

...The White House, however, insists that Penn and Schoen do no more than supply numbers...

...Morris, contacted recently, said he remembers Penn and Schoen's urging him to allow them to hold off disclosing their clients until at least January 1996, so that their client in the Turkish election would not be criticized for hiring high-priced American consultants...

...Squier and Knapp still turn up at some weekly political meetings—a White House aide estimates about one out of three...

...he and the others were all "waved in," the standard admission procedure for White House visitors...

...Why the exception...

...There could be no possible policy reason for it...

...Two others with a piece of the media work, Hank Sheinkopf and Marius Penczner, were not regulars at the Wednesday-night political meetings and therefore were not required to file...

...Got plenty of that every day...

...Or that they did jury polling for Jim Guy Tucker...

...In fact, Morris never held a hard pass...

...Penn and Schoen represented AT&T, which had a gigantic interest in legislation overhauling telecommunications regulation...

...Watchdogs might ask why, if the remaining members of the November Five Group advise on campaigns but not on policy, they are still meeting with the president and top aides long after the election...

...Early in Clinton's first term, his original team—James Carville, Paul Begala, Stan Greenberg, and Mandy Grunwald—caused an uproar when it was reported that they had free run of the White House...

...It's difficult to ferret out all their clients, but clearly business is booming in the wake of Clinton's victory...

...But McCurry brushed this off as a possible reason for the White House's change of heart on disclosure...

...Associates of Penn, Schoen, Squier, and Knapp say they've also worked for political candidates in Turkey, Israel, Bermuda, and Venezuela...

...Not everyone agrees...

...Tucker was a longtime client, he said...

...This is Zeitgeist, this is not policy," says presidential spokesman Mike McCurry...

...one possible explanation is potential election-year embarrassment to the White House...

...Deepening the mystery of these consultants' nondisclosure is the White House's flip-flop on whether disclosure would be required...

...We were basically inseparable in the White House...

...Since the strategies flow in part from the polling, it doesn't seem like a distinction that really holds up," said Paul Hendrie of the Center for Responsive Politics...

...Morris's disclosure report was released to the press, which apparently sought no similar disclosure for the other consultants...

...Clinton's Private Pollsters by Karen Ball Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, the president's pollsters, spend Wednesday evenings at the White House residence feeding the numbers-obsessed Bill clinton data on how his strategies are going over with the public...

...Sources say the new group—who called themselves the November Five Group—griped and moaned for weeks...

...Morris would call the president all the time," said a senior presidential aide...

...I don't think it's shocking, controversial, or even very interesting that [Penn and Schoen] were working for AT&T...

...Schoen said that he and the other consultants prepared disclosure statements but were told not to bother formally submitting them, on the grounds that their work was "polling, not policy" and their "degree of contact was sufficiently limited...

...Tucker was ultimately convicted on two counts of fraud...

...Karen Ball, a freelance writer, covered the White House for the New York Daily Newsfow 1994 to 1997...