"I was told that they wanted the contributors to be more available -- essentially, closer to Washington," Ragin' Cajun Mr. Carville told Politico, noting that it was the network's decision. "I'm not always available, I don't live there." The couple primarily resides in New Orleans.

The ideologically opposite couple have been a topic of interest (how do they do it?) and inspiration (if they can make it work despite different political outlooks, maybe there is hope for all of us) since they married after they worked against each other in the 1992 presidential campaign. Although Mr. Carville's candidate (Bill Clinton) won against Ms. Matalin's candidate (George Bush I), ultimately, it was a victory for love.

In honor of their departure, we found a 2009 CNN interview outlining their secrets to successful compromise within a marriage.

"I don't have a position on anything domestically. So I just say yes, and then go on and do it," Mr. Carville said, in response to a viewer's question about their marriage. "I would say the three ingredients to successful marriage is surrender, capitulation and retreat."

"Spoken like a true liberal. What a martyr," Ms. Matalin responded. "Faith, family and good wine. That's how we do it."

If politics make strange bedfellows, we suppose punditry make even stranger ones.

Clip below:

There was a prospect, the friend said, that privileged the skill set of a well-connected woman of means: to be a consulting editor, the primary task of which was to conceptualize and acquire books, a profession that did not require Onassis, then 46 years old, to do an internship. She started at Viking on a four-day work week at a salary of $200 a week, moved to Doubleday in 1978 and worked in publishing until her death, in 1994, a total of 19 years. She published a list of more than 100 books. Their subjects ranged wildly but they were weighted heavily in the fields of dance (I Remember Balanchine, by Frances Mason), royalty (Secrets of Marie Antoinette, by Olivier Bernier), celebrity memoir (Michael Jackson's Moonwalk), children's stories (Carly Simon's Amy the Dancing Bear), home decorating (John Loring's The New Tiffany Table Settings) or various combinations of the above (Fred Astaire: His Friends Talk, by Sarah Giles).

Last month Random House hired another editor with no prior publishing experience who, at least in some circles, might be called a celebrity. Dana Perino, Fox News commentator and former press secretary for President George W. Bush, will work for the conservative imprint Crown Forum under the title of editorial director. Like Onassis' first job in publishing, Ms. Perino's, as described by Random House in a press release, will be to "recommend, initiate, and submit exclusively to Crown Forum six to eight nonfiction book projects each year." Unlike Onassis, who at least boasted an eclectic roster of talented friends, Ms. Perino will be developing books written by "conservative political or media personalities."

While editors who have toiled in the cubicles of the large publishing houses might have quietly rolled their eyes to each other upon hearing the news, Ms. Perino will not be the first such hire (conservative political strategist Mary Matalin assumed a similar role at Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint Threshold Editions in 2005), nor is she likely to be the last.

In Ms. Perino's hire, Random House has added to the growing ranks of a peculiar new job increasingly popular at New York publishing houses. It's kind of like a consultant, except that it does not necessarily involve offering advice to reshape a brand. It's also rather like the music industry's A&R scouts, except that for someone like Ms. Perino, the task is not to find unknown talent but to rein in people who have already achieved the status of "personality." Affixed with an assortment of titles--for Ms. Perino, it is editorial director, but in other cases it has been editor at large or, in the case of Ms. Matalin, editor in chief--the most accurate way of describing this position might be, when benevolent, a fixer, and when annoyed (as quite a few of publishing's traditionalists seem to be), a wrangler.

"The reason she was attractive for us in that role is that she's just very well connected, particularly in conservative political circles, but also beyond," said David Drake, a publicist for Crown, of Ms. Perino's hire. "She's just very connected and has her ear to the ground in terms of a certain kind of politics."

Ms. Perino arrives at the tail end of a two-year hiring spree by Random House, largely of editors from outside of book publishing, including many from the magazine world. There is the former editor of the defunct cooking magazine Gourmet, Ruth Reichl, hired with the title of editor at large and a mandate to consult on Random's list of cookbooks and digital cooking publications. There's Jon Meacham, former editor of Newsweek, who was brought on as an executive editor, charged with acquiring books of nonfiction and biography. Rounding out the list are Andy Ward, formerly of GQ; Lorraine Glennon, former features editor of Ladies Home Journal; and Diane Salvatore, former editor in chief of Ladies Home Journal.

Distinguishing who among this crowd of relative newcomers is a traditional editor versus fixer/wrangler can be tricky. On the acquisitional end is Ms. Perino, whose time commitment to Random House can be estimated according to her continued external obligations: She will be keeping up her appearances on Fox; her job as president of her own public-relations firm, Dana Perino and Company; her "association" with the public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller; her board position with the government's Broadcasting Board of Governors; and her revolving engagements on the lecture circuit. Ms. Reichl, for her part, does not seem to have a phone number at Random House, and a publicist confirmed she "works from home." (She turned down a request for an interview through her agent.) Others are more involved: Jon Meacham has an office (or what one publishing executive called "a place to hang his ego") and an assistant who answers his phone, but he is also a working journalist (and builder of many bridges: his story "What If There's No Hell?" ran on the cover of last week's Time). Andy Ward, quaintly, seems to be just a plain old editor of books with a full-time job at Random House.

Ms. Salvatore, who went from magazines to Random House imprint Broadway Books and back to magazines in the span of a year (she's now the editor in chief of Prevention), said that bringing in outsiders from publishing is an obvious move as book publishing becomes less and less about, well, books.

"Content now accordions much more, is not static, so that where you once read a book, you now may dip in and out of chapters, you may want it serialized, you may want to see the video instead of read the words," Ms. Salvatore wrote in an email. "So you need people who can think three-dimensionally about content at all times."

Ms. Perino, who served as a communications strategist on George W. Bush's memoir Decision Points, seems to be able to think in three dimensions (Mr. Bush's memoir sold more than three million copies). And notwithstanding her lack of experience, Ms. Perino inspired gracious comments from the heads of other conservative imprints. Adam Bellow, whose title of editorial director at HarperCollins' Broadside Books has different connotations (Mr. Bellow has spent his entire career in publishing, um, editing books), called it a "creative hire." Adrian Zackheim, publisher at Penguin's Sentinel, said, "It's hardly surprising that Random wants to be where the action is."

Mr. Zackheim also noted, however, that his imprint does not have an outside consultant, distinct from the people involved in the editorial process, to reel in writers. "We do all that in-house here," said Mr. Zackheim of Sentinel.

Robert Barnett, the Washington lawyer who negotiates book deals for political heavyweights such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and numerous U.S. senators, said that in the context of cutthroat competition for conservative authors, Ms. Perino's hire is obvious.

"She will be in a position to help identify potential writers and help get those writers into their stable," he said. He added that she will also likely help publicize the books and sell them. "In those ways, she'll be very successful."

One former holder of an editor-at-large position at Random House, Kurt Andersen, was happy to discuss the details of how it worked. When asked about his nebulous title at Random House, Mr. Andersen said, "I'm not really sure I still have that nebulous title there anymore," explaining it was a short-lived arrangement when he was between writing novels (also for Random House).

For roughly two years starting in 2007, however, he said he was paid a modest salary "because I know a lot of writers and I have a lot of conversations with writers." Describing himself as "just somebody deputized out in the world," Mr. Andersen helped birth two books at Random House. One was a Vietnam memoir called Guts, by Robert Nylen. The second, Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System by the pollster Douglas Schoen, was about third-party politics.

"It was more like a consulting arrangement than anything else," said Mr. Andersen. "I didn't have an office there; I didn't go to meetings everyday. ... My understanding is that Jon Meacham has more of a day job."

And whether the new editors will adopt the manners of Jackie O.--a bouquet of flowers for her authors on publication day, leather-bound editions of one's books and beautifully handwritten notes--remains to be seen.

ewitt@observer.com

The show is called Both Sides Now and the idea is for the two idealogically opposed, though very respectful, women to have it out on different issues and Mr. Green to play middle man.

In the first episode, Mr. Green asked the pair about the strong showing that women had in primary results earlier this month. Ms. Matalin paraphrased Margaret Thacher, saying "if you want something talked about give it to a man, if you want something done, give it to a woman."

Unless that thing that you want done is a radio show, in which case women will talk about things, too.

Sarah Palin is a living, breathing Rorschach test. It doesn’t really matter what she says or does: Her fans and critics will see whatever they want to see.

So when she suddenly quit as Alaska’s governor on Friday, the analyses about what it all meant were decisive, predictable and mostly wrong.

The critics, when they weren’t speculating that a massive scandal would soon be unearthed to explain Palin’s hasty exit, proclaimed Palin’s move an act of political suicide that would ruin whatever hopes she has of mounting a credible presidential campaign in 2012.

The best example came from Bruce Reed, an old Bill Clinton adviser, who wrote a weekend column for Slate titled “Quitters Never Win.” Reed’s contention: Presidential candidates in the last 20 years can be separated into two groups: “quitters” and “perseverers”—with only the perseverers having success.

As evidence, Reed offers the examples of Gary Hart, John Edwards and Bill Bradley—“strategic quitters” who left the Senate several years before seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and losing. Contrast that track record, Reed says, with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both of whom successfully sought reelection in their home states two years before winning the presidency, and you’ll understand why Palin’s resignation dooms her for ’12.

Reed’s history lesson amounts to a sweeping conclusion in search of supporting evidence—the hallmark of ideologically motivated political analysis. His interpretation is, to put it politely, conveniently selective and highly misleading.

First, consider the “strategic quitters” he cited. It’s true that Hart declined to seek reelection to his Senate seat in 1986 in order to run for the 1988 Democratic nomination, but that move had nothing to do with his defeat—it was his dalliance with Donna Rice in the spring of 1987 that did him in.

Reed fails to note that when the Rice scandal erupted, Hart—who had burst onto the national scene with his near-miss bid for the ’84 nod—was the overwhelming Democratic front-runner, fresh off a highly publicized trip to Moscow that had fortified his national security credentials. No one was seriously calling him a quitter for not seeking reelection in ’86, and it had no impact on his presidential campaign, so his example really doesn’t mean anything.

The same can be said of Edwards, who declined to seek a second Senate term in North Carolina in 2004. In fact, the evidence is pretty clear that Edwards’ Senate exit actually enhanced his prospects; only after leaving Washington was he able to define himself as the conscience of his party’s grass roots, “courageously” lashing out at the timidity of Congressional Democrats in the face of the Iraq war and the Bush agenda. No, he didn’t end up winning, but he would have been just as overshadowed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had he stayed in the Senate, so his example doesn’t mean anything, either. (Reed also seems to suggest that Edwards wouldn’t have met Rielle Hunter had he stayed in the Senate; of course, it’s very possible he still would have—just as it’s possible he would have met another woman.)

Then there’s Bradley, whose 1996 exit from the Senate (after three terms) helped “cost him the Democratic nomination in 2000 to Al Gore, whose slogan was ‘stand and fight,’” according to Reed.

First, Gore’s refrain was actually “stay and fight.” Second, Reed forgets that Bradley actually had a solid rejoinder: “The problem is that people in Washington stay too long and fight too much.” More to the point, Bradley lost mainly because of the broad organizational and institutional support behind Gore, the popularity of Clinton and Bradley’s own lethargy on the stump. Does anyone seriously believe that Senator Bill Bradley would have fared any differently in 2000 than former Senator Bill Bradley did?

At the same time, Clinton’s ’92 election is hardly an advertisement for Reed’s “perseverer” theory. Actually (as Reed should remember), Clinton’s 1990 reelection campaign in Arkansas severely complicated his ’92 ambitions because he was forced to promise Arkansans that he’d serve out his term if reelected, and not run for president. It took him the first half of 1991 to ease his way out of that pledge—and only a once-in-a-generation vacuum on the Democratic side (thanks to the early ’91 Gulf War, which froze the Democratic race and kept the big names out) allowed him to get away with it.

And, of course, Reed neglects the other cases of campaigns that were clearly enhanced by “strategic quitting.” Like Mitt Romney, who, facing certain defeat in a bid for a second term as Massachusetts’ governor in 2006, opted out and headed off to run for president. He didn’t win the G.O.P. nomination, but he came close—and, if history is any guide, he’s now the man to beat for the ’12 Republican nod. Similarly, Mike Huckabee also declined to wage an iffy reelection campaign in Arkansas in 2006. Like Romney, he didn’t win the G.O.P. nod, but he sure exceeded expectations—and is sitting pretty as ’12 approaches.

Oh, and let’s not forget George Allen, who “persevered” his way right out of the 2008 presidential mix by seeking reelection to the Senate in Virginia in 2006, only to lose to Jim Webb.

You get the point. Reed may want Palin to fail in ’12, and she may well fail if she does run. But history is, at best, neutral on the subject.

Not that Palin’s fans are immune to such wishful analysis. “Brilliant” was how Mary Matalin (last seen insisting that all was peachy in Fred Thompson-land) described Palin’s move. Over at Fox News, “a brilliant, liberating move,” was Peter Ferrara’s take. This smacks of hyperbolic overcompensation: Palin’s enemies are shouting about how reckless and suicidal her resignation supposedly is, so her friends counter by treating it like a masterstroke for the ages.

At the end of the day, though, the reality is that Palin’s move is neither suicidal nor brilliant. In terms of the odds of Sarah Palin ever becoming president, it doesn’t actually change much.

So people who think Sarah Palin is a ridiculous figure in the first place now claim that it’s ridiculous to think that a woman who resigns the governorship of Alaska 32 months after winning it could somehow be a serious presidential candidate in ’12. In a perfect world, they’d be right. But reality, as we saw last fall, has little to do with politics—particularly within a shrinking Republican Party that is increasingly dominated by its most reactionary elements.

These are the folks who flocked, by the tens of thousands, to Palin rallies last fall—utterly indifferent to the left’s assertions that a woman who two years earlier had been mayor of a town of 8,000 people wasn’t prepared for the presidency. Palin may lose a few Republican friends over this, but by and large, the G.O.P. base—with whom she scored a 73 percent favorable rating two weeks ago—will excuse and rationalize her resignation, just as they excused and rationalized her thin résumé last fall. They see what they want to see.

Before last Friday, there were three top-tier prospects for the ’12 G.O.P. nomination: Romney, (by far) the most likely winner; Huckabee, the second choice; and Palin, with popularity deep enough to make her a serious factor but probably not broad enough to actually secure the nod. That dynamic has not been appreciably altered. It also seemed clear that Palin, if she were somehow to win the nomination, would be the G.O.P.’s Walter Mondale—a symbol to the general-election audience of everything they’d rejected four years earlier and a certain loser. That remains true as well.

Palin’s exit as a governor seems most likely to reinforce opinions—not to change them.

Ben Smith at the Politico raises the issue today on his blog, asking a "series of Simon & Schuster authors—including Michael Moore, Alexandra Pelosi, and Paul Begala" how they feel about getting their paychecks from the same place as Mr. Corsi.

Most of them didn't respond, Ben writes, but a spokesman for one pretty big one, Hillary Clinton, did. What did he say? Basically, that Simon & Schuster shouldn't be held responsible for what Threshold—which is run by GOP operative Mary Matalin—does. "Threshold has absolutely nothing to do with the people at Simon & Schuster who have published [Hillary Clinton's] books," the spokesman told Ben.

Will other authors (not to mention all those people who own shares of S&S's parent company, CBS) be so generous? More on this later in the week.

Dermot McEvoy at Publisher's Weekly wanted to know how Ms. Matalin felt about Mr. Hudson, whose righteous lifelong efforts in the name of Christian morality were ever so slightly tarnished when the student he got involved with with at Fordham brought a sexual abuse suit against him.

Her response? "Deal Hudson’s contributions to advancing conservative ideas and idealism is seminal... I have always felt privileged to work with him and honored to publish him."

The rest of the article's substantially more compelling than that, and it includes quotations from Mr. Hudson's books where he addresses the sex scandal directly.

“Only 39 days until the Iowa caucuses,” Tim Russert gravely intoned over the dramatic John Williams “Meet the Press” score. “The Democratic race: too close to call. The Republican race: too close to call. Which issues, policies, strategies will resonate?”

If Mr. Russert really wanted a thoughtful and provocative discussion of that subject, then why did he—yet again—hand over half of his show to James Carville and Mary Matalin, two of the four panelists whose punditry monopolized Sunday’s one-hour broadcast?

This is not an issue of disclosure. Mr. Russert correctly noted in his opening that Mr. Carville “helped put Bill and Hillary Clinton in the White House in 1992” and that Ms. Matalin supports Fred Thompson, and later pointed out that Mr. Carville has also donated money to Hillary Clinton’s ’08 campaign.

Instead, it’s a question of quality, fairness and basic respect for the intelligence and time of the viewing audience. Does Mr. Russert, the host of what is supposed to be the preeminent news discussion program on television, actually believe that Mr. Carville and Mrs. Matalin provide viewers with objective analysis? And why does he continually include them—on a regular panel that also features Republican Mike Murphy and Democrat Bob Shrum—without offering a similar platform to any of the other candidates’ prominent supporters?

It took about 14 seconds on Sunday for Mr. Carville to show his stripes, when Mr. Russert used the first question of the show to ask Mr. Carville to analyze the latest Iowa numbers, which show Mrs. Clinton trailing Barack Obama, 30 to 26 percent (with John Edwards at 22 percent). Released last week, the poll prompted a round of Is-Hillary-Suddenly-In-Trouble stories in the press.

Mr. Carville’s response could have been written by Howard Wolfson: He immediately downplayed the significance of what is inarguably a negative development for his candidate.

“It says that Iowa is very tight,” Mr. Carville said, “and this poll and every poll has shown that it’s very tight. Also, Iowa polls are unreliable over a month out. John Kerry was running third, Bill Bradley, at the time, was way ahead of Al Gore in Iowa.”

He went on in this spirit, but let’s stop right there, because Mr. Carville, in those few sentences, already mangled history in a way that is conveniently conducive to Mrs. Clinton. His claim that Bill Bradley “was way ahead of Al Gore in Iowa” at any point during the 2000 campaign is false on its face. In fact, eight years ago nearly to the day, an Iowa poll showed Mr. Gore throttling Mr. Bradley, 54 to 32 percent. Mr. Gore led Iowa wire-to-wire in 2000. New Hampshire was the volatile state that year, not Iowa.

Maybe this was just an innocent misstatement by Mr. Carville. After all, his broader point has the ring of truth: The Iowa leaderboard, the 2000 example notwithstanding, can change in a hurry. Any pundit in the country could have made that observation. But because of his personal devotion to the Clintons, it can’t be assumed that Mr. Carville’s motives in making it were pure. Actually, his entire answer raised several questions, including:

* If the poll in question had shown Mrs. Clinton—and not Mr. Obama—opening a lead, would Mr. Carville have been as quick to point out, as he did, that it’s still early, that other polls have produced different results, and that surveys at this stage can be unreliable?

* Was his inaccurate statement about the Gore-Bradley race an understandable error, or was he—like any master of spin—guilty of intentional exaggeration and overstatement in an effort to amplify his Clinton-serving argument?

And this was only the first question of the show. The next time he spoke up, it was to point out that Mrs. Clinton had “performed superbly” in the Democratic debates and to echo her attack that Mr. Obama’s health care plan “doesn’t have the mandate, leaves 15 million people uninsured.”

Good lord. Where was the competing, pro-Obama “analyst” to point out, say, the massive campaign contributions that Mrs. Clinton has gobbled up from the health insurance industry?

Even Mr. Carville’s “criticisms” of Mrs. Clinton could be seen as subtle efforts to blunt attacks on her and to bolster her campaign. For instance, Mr. Russert pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s pilloried performance two debates ago and asked if “her answer on the driver’s license immigration issue and on other issues, or her reluctance to answer, hurt her with the honest, trustworthy questions that were asked in this poll?”

Mr. Carville’s responded that he “did not think that that was (her) best performance”—something Mrs. Clinton herself had said publicly—and then quickly added that “anybody that looks at her performance over the course of the debates says that this a competent, thought-out campaign.”

During a discussion of Mrs. Clinton’s recent effort to claim credit for the domestic economy during her husband’s presidency, Mr. Carville—as if it represented some stunning admission on his part—offered his opinion that “ her argument is actually not a bad one, in this case.”

It was no better when the talk turned to the Republicans, with Ms. Matalin, an advisor to the Fred Thompson presidential campaign, assuming the role her husband filled on the Democratic side.

Confronted with Iowa numbers that are downright atrocious for her candidate—a distant third place, nine points behind Mike Huckabee—Ms. Matalin, just like her husband, sought to downplay them.

“Oh, the dynamic hasn’t changed,” she said. “The numbers have changed. He’s down from his peak, but Rudy’s down from his peak. Rudy’s substantially down from his peak … the national polls, Fred Thompson remains in second place. In South Carolina, a more pivotal state than the first two states, he’s tied for first with Romney, who’s been all over TV for two months.”

If the conversation had been about any candidate besides Ms. Matalin’s, does anyone actually believe she would have been so quick to thumb her nose at such damning polls numbers?

And in the next breath, she took it one step further, matter-of-factly hauling out talking points aimed squarely at Mr. Huckabee, who just so happens to have emerged as the chief strategic threat to Mr. Thompson.

“He’s horrible on immigration, he’s for benefits for illegal aliens,” she said. “He’s terrible on spending and taxes, right? Historic tax increases in Arkansas, government spending increased by 50 percent, government employees increased by 20 percent.”

She argued that pointing this out is imperative for Mitt Romney’s campaign, since it is Mr. Romney whose Iowa lead is now threatened by Mr. Huckabee, which is true enough. But what she didn’t add is that the Thompson campaign—her campaign—is counting on Mr. Romney defeating Mr. Huckabee soundly in Iowa, so that Mr. Thompson will face Mr. Romney, a Massachusetts Mormon, in South Carolina—and not Mr. Huckabee, a fellow Southerner.

Mr. Russert has convened this same Carville-Matalin-Shrum-Murphy panel several times. But he ought to consider what it’s supposed to accomplish. If he wants objective and detached (and occasionally unpredictable) analysis from political pros, Mr. Carville and Ms. Matalin need to go. They are shills.

And if he really is interested in dueling recitations of campaign spin, he should simply replace Mr. Shrum and Mr. Murphy with spokespeople for the rest of the candidates.

"He answered the decathlon," Mr. Plimpton said. "He said it was because, there, you had 10 disciplines that you could concentrate on … And it's quite evident that he has the ability to do it, too. This is a man who is able to stand and give a speech and not have you-know-who popping up in the back of his head."

In a word, Bill Clinton is the national embodiment of a neurotic symptom that has showed up as the self-description of overreachers everywhere: compartmentalization. And, boy, can he compartmentalize. Never before has American public life been witness to a man who can open and shut the many doors of his mind and soul with such chilling self-assurance. The country has watched with wonder and nausea as Bill Clinton has diffracted himself into several Bill Clintons-the adulterer, the good father, the loyal husband, the lousy husband, the liar, the truth-teller, the empath, the charmer, the politico, the policy wonk, the man who loved Yitzhak Rabin, the man who strokes Yasir Arafat, the peacemaker, the missile launcher, the liberal, the social conservative, the moral arbiter, the seducer. Is he polymorphous? Is he perverse? He is the man about whom Toni Morrison wrote, "He's our first black President." And yet he's not a black man. He's just trained, as his generation was, to be all things to all men, and women. And not too much of anything to anyone.

He's compartmentalized.

And at last count, 62 percent of the country loved the guy.

And 62 percent of the compartmentalized nation said they couldn't trust him.

Because just as Bill Clinton long ago chose to abandon rigid character for cagey adaptability, we, too, suspect that it may be the only way to survive in the new Mad Max century. Compartmentalization is the neurosis of our time, the psychological refuge of the privileged and the spoiled. It's the malady of a society with endless choices. Got a problem? Create a new window for it!

Since Monica Lewinsky spurted onto the scene one year ago, the Republicans have been trying to sell us on character, and it hasn't worked. George Bush had character. So did Bob ("I'm just a man") Dole. But character is an inhibiting constraint in this era; it keeps you from doing everything you want. Like our President, we don't want to deny ourselves anything, we don't want to be pinned down, we don't want to do the hard work of integration. We all want to wriggle free. We want to present many versions of ourselves to everybody. And we don't want to disappoint anybody. What did Dick Morris tell the President? The American people would accept adultery, but not perjury. What is adultery? It's showing affection to too many people. What's perjury? It's getting caught lying.

When Linda Tripp told the TV cameras, "I am you," she was laughed off stage. Because deep down we already knew: Bill Clinton was us. We've all got a you-know-who or a you-know-what popping up in the backs of our heads. And we continue to marvel at a man who has been able to pull it off. Until recently.

"When the scandal first broke last January, and he had to deliver his State of the Union address, Clinton hit a grand slam using his ability to compartmentalize," said Clinton biographer David Maraniss. "All the senators and Congressmen in the hall were staring at him, wondering, 'Could I have done this? Could I have concentrated on this speech while everything was breaking apart around me?'"

Mr. Clinton may be the prime specimen of the compartmentalizer, but take a look around New York. In a city which thrives on that sense of everything continually breaking apart around one, we are surrounded by a city of compartmentalizers. It's just that no one really wants to admit it.

Compartmentalizers eventually have to make a decision: a healthy dose of self-disgust may drive them to change their lives, or they must tip the scales of their own destruction, à la Bill Clinton. If only to silence the unbearable noise of all those opening and shutting doors.

"On the one hand, you probably can't succeed in modern life without being able to compartmentalize," said Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac . "This culture favors people who are able to not grieve for long periods of time, to be very flexible, to put things aside and move on. On the other hand, there is some loss involved, in the way that we think it's a fully human trait to be deeply affected by things; that if you've done something wrong that there's some virtue in really sitting with it, contemplating it, being some way moved to deep changes, and feeling oneself as a whole person. That's a psychological ideal that could be counterpoised to this other ideal, of being able to say 'Well, that was bad, and now, what's on my agenda for today?'"

"Compartmentalization is what allows us to focus," said Sharyn Wolf, a West Village psychotherapist and author of the book Fifty Ways to Find a Lover . "Manhattanites have massive stimuli from all kinds of places funneling through our heads at all times … A woman who when she's at home, she's a mom, when she's in the office, she's a lawyer, when she's at a party, she's a good, funky dancer-compartmentalizing is part of what helps us just sort of be in the moment. Basically, if you have no compartmentalization whatsoever, you're probably schizophrenic."

Dr. Bertram Slaff, a psychiatrist affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital who has a private practice on the Upper East Side, holds a similarly benign view. "I don't think that it should be thought of in terms of an illness," he said. "It seems to me a coping technique that many people have, which is to have something for being a parent, and something for being a social individual, and something for being a worker. I think of it not as something wrong but just as something that is. It requires that we be able to prioritize, what we would call focusing."

However, Dr. Jerome Levin, New York psychotherapist and author of the just-published The Clinton Syndrome: The President and the Destructive Nature of Sexual Addiction , thinks he knows the First Compartmentalizer all too well. "I compare Clinton to the Titanic ," he said, "which had these watertight compartments, but they only went up to the sixth deck. Once the water went over that level, the ship sank."

The ship was sunk, of course, by a blowjob, the sex act of choice for the modern compartmentalizer. "You separate your genitals from the rest of you," said Dr. Levin. There's no real relationship there, except that she brings him to orgasm."

"Monica Lewinsky truly wanted it," said Mr. Plimpton. "She kept pleading with him, 'Put it in me.' The reason he didn't do it: discipline. He kept himself from going all the way. Clinton must have been telling himself that although they were having fun, I must be careful. I mustn't go all the way."

The President learned early. "This form of compartmentalizing is nothing new for Clinton," declared Mr. Maraniss. "It goes back to his childhood … His mother taught him how to create different fantasy worlds to help keep him going. As the wife of an alcoholic, it was the same thing that she had to do."

Then again, sometimes compartmentalization makes swell bedfellows. Politically divided power couple Mary Matalin and James Carville prospered personally and professionally through rigorous compartmentalization. During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ms. Matalin told the Los Angeles Times , "I had to compartmentalize my sweet baby James and Carville the Ax-Murdering Consultant From Hell, whose face I wanted to rip off every day."

Since the Lewinsky scandal broke, said Ms. Matalin, their temporarily integrated household has recompartmentalized. "My New Year's resolution is to no longer take out my husband for the foibles of his President," she said four days into 1999. "It's been much worse than quitting smoking." Ms. Matalin said their differences over the Monica matter is on a par with their debates about partial-birth abortion. "We obviously have to compartmentalize now more than we ever did. Last year was the supreme test of my capacity to do so within the house."

New Yorkers who admit to compartmentalizing tend to cast it as a positive thing, a time management skill. "I certainly feel, well, that relates to me," said Kate White, author of Nine Secrets of Women Who Get Everything They Want and freshly appointed editor in chief of Cosmopolitan. "I remember my very first editor-in-chief job, at Child magazine, and what it was like when everything's really resting on you and you in a sense own it. For the first time, I didn't just slam the door on the work and forget about it. It went with me. I was giving my 9-month-old son a bath and I realized I was thinking about the magazine." Then she compartmentalized and presto! All was well.

"I think that if you want to get to the top in many ways, in any industry, that you have to be able to claw on your way up, and a lot of that has to be compartmentalized," said Women on Top author Nancy Friday, who is married to Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine. "It's so tied into a career, having business goals. The workplace is the workplace and you don't want to bring your feelings into it." Is her husband, well, you know …? "Let me put it simply," she said. "He was compartmentalized when I met him, but I always thought that was the first work that you do in getting a man to fall in love with you, is talking him into dropping those barriers." (Mr. Pearlstine did not return a phone call seeking comment.)

"The demands on character are much higher here [in New York]," said Ms. Wolf, the therapist. "The ability to be fragmented in a thousand places is much more prominent. The simple business of noise around us! The simple business of how much we need to earn to pay our rent. The simple business of the kind of shape people expect us to be in somehow."

Naomi Wolf, the Rhodes Scholar, mother, wife, post-feminist babe, anti-makeup author, pro-makeup author, recently reinstated New Yorker, had this to say about the "C" malady: "Anyone in this kind of alpha, hyper, success-driven culture is encouraged and rewarded to split off any aspect of themself that is vulnerable, complex, or weak … I think it's one of the great sort of diseases of late industrialized society, that we're not integrated. It's dangerous, because the more compartmentalized, the more amoral you can tell yourself to be."

Are Rhodes Scholars, like the President, particularly susceptible? "If what you're talking about is dishonesty to the self, then definitely the need to present a perfect front, a perfect facade generates-I mean, it's a recipe for dishonesty, to others and to the self," she said. "I wouldn't think Rhodes scholars any more than anyone else in our own particular cultural rat race, which is about competitiveness and naked ambition at the expense of integration of real values."

What does she think of her fellow Rhodes scholar in the White House? "I can't talk about that!" she said, slamming shut that compartment. "I have so many partisan conflicts , my husband's ties to the White House and so on. But I can talk about compartmentalization as a thing ." For example, she said, "I can't bear to bring my daughter's photographs with me when I'm traveling on business, because I wouldn't be able to leave her if I had something so concrete to remind me of her."

Does success require compartmentalization?

"I suppose it's a very good way to organize oneself. I don't really think about it much," said Manhattanite Todd Solondz, director of the film Happiness , with its psychologist-father-pederast protagonist. Of the characters in his movie, Mr. Solondz said, "I thought they were quite functional … I mean, you know, they all held jobs and took care of, managed their families and so forth, and were materially O.K."

Tom Freston, the chairman of MTV Networks, remembers growing up in a world where compartmentalization was actually easier . "My father seemed to have his life completely compartmentalized," he said. "He would get out of work at 5 P.M., maybe go to a conference a year, and that would be it." Mr. Freston has a more difficult time of it. "With all the things we have to carry now, cell phones and beepers, I've found that it's harder and harder to compartmentalize and stop things from my business life seeping into my personal life," he said. "The premise of 1984 was that it was the government watching you. Now it has expanded: It's your friends, the people you work with."

Take Josh Byard, rising star in New York's Silicon Alley, 27, former P.R. man. "I'm highly compartmentalized," he said. "For example, I have a certain group of friends that I knew when I was in college that I do certain things with, and then I have people that I work with who I also get along with, and I also have other friends that I've met since I've gotten out of college, and it is very rare that I bring people together in that way."

Others hear the word compartmentalization and snort. "The idea of compartmentalization has the same qualities as Ivory soap," said Dr. Robert Cancro, chair of the New York University psychiatry department. "It's 99.44 percent froth. Why do we have to explain how people deal with adversity while continuing with their day to day responsibilities? What you have to remember is that organisms much simpler than humans are able to adapt. There is a tendency to believe that whenever anything is granted a name, it exists. To grant this a name beyond adaptation and coping is just plain silly."

Dr. Slaff tended to agree. "Surely you are aware," he said, "that there are many men who have wives who are put on a pedestal whom they respect, and they have fucking good fun with whores. Isn't that compartmentalization? It's generally thought of as part of the real world."

Of the President, Dr. Slaff said, "I think he was horny! He's 52 years old, and do individuals that age have the right to be horny? Of course they do!"

"In the past, when we heard someone saying one thing, then doing another, we assumed it was just outright hypocrisy," said Dr. Gail Reed, an Upper East Side psychiatrist . "And by just looking at the external behavior, it is … But what do we consider it if the person is really not aware of what they are doing? There are various degrees by which people are dishonest about things which make them ashamed, from the most psychotic form of lying (when the person is completely aware of the lie) to various ways of trying to protect themselves from pain and embarrassment because they've done something they know they shouldn't have done."

"Clinton is not the first person of whom this has been said," said speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was a genius at taking the various compartments of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and wrapping them into one compact point of light. "It was said 30 years ago, admiringly , of John F. Kennedy," said Ms. Noonan. "In that case, what they meant in those days when they said that a man had a gift for compartmentalization, they meant in a way that he was a gifted generalist that could go from one demanding subject to another, and who could balance in his mind. It was considered an intellectual gift; now it is viewed as a emotional process."

And her fellow New Yorkers? "It is a hard-shouldered city that we have here," she said. "It is full of geniuses, risk takers, dreamers … and to make things a little more confusing, a lot of the geniuses, risk takers, dreamers, are also operators , too. So, are there a lot of people in New York who will say, my gosh, I compartmentalize, too? Yeah, there are. And I suppose some of them might even mean something good about it."

One New Yorker, George Stephanopoulos-Washingtonian-turned-West Side resident, Rhodes scholar, Stairmasterer, White House aide, ABC News employee, Columbia University faculty member-had the last word on the topic.

"Compartmentalization," he said, "is just too Clinton. I'm sorry."