This is how the Insiders describe the passage of a day:

The day is composed, not of hours or minutes, but of news cycles. In each cycle, senior White House officials speaking on background define the line of the day. The line is echoed and amplified outside the Beltway to real people, who live out there, by the President's surrogates, whose appearances create actualities (on radio) and talking heads (on television). During the rollout of a new policy, the President, coached by his handlers and working from talking points and briefing books churned out by war room aides, may permit his own head to talk. There are various ways in which he might do this, ranging from the simplest photo op to a one on one with a media big-foot, to the more elaborately orchestrated media hit (perhaps an impromptu with real people) to the full-fledged spectacle of a town hall.

The line, a subunit of the Administration's thematic message, is reinforced by leaks and plants and massaged through the care and feeding of the press. It is adjusted by spin patrol and corrected through damage control when mistakes are made or gaffes are committed that take attention off-message and can create a dreaded feeding frenzy. Reaction to the line is an important part of the cycle, and it comes primarily from Congressional leaders of both parties, the strange-sounding biparts, whose staff-written utterances are often delivered directly to media outlets via fax attacks. The result of all this activity passes through the media filter, where it is cut into tiny, easily digestible sound bites and fed to already overstuffed pundits, who deliver the ultimate product of the entire process, a new piece of conventional wisdom.

Every species produces its perfect flower and every culture its perfect moment. In the late spring of 1993, the perfect flower of the insider species and the perfect moment of the image culture met in the Presidential appointment of David R. Gergen, Washington's circular man.

The career of David Gergen represents the triumph of image. The character of David Gergen represents the apotheosis of the insider. The two are rolled up in him together, in a shining, seamless roundness whose mirrored surface reveals nothing but the political scene rolling by. In himself, Gergen has conflated all the old distinctions. Over the course of 22 years, he has traveled from White House to White House, from Government to journalism to punditry and now back to Government (and soon enough, you may bet on it, back to journalism again), from the Democratic camp to the Republican to the Independent to the Democratic again. So perfectly is he of his time and place and class that he is himself part of the tribal language. To be Gergenized is to be spun by the velveteen hum of this soothing man's smoothing voice into a state of such vertigo that the sense of what is real disappears into a blur. Nothing is more Gergenized than Gergen himself. The blur is the man. He is his own magic movie, forever revising the reality of himself.

On May 29, David Gergen was appointed counselor to the new President, a Democrat. The move surprised many who had known Gergen as a servant of three Republican Presidents, including one -- Ronald Reagan -- whom the new President had charged with ruining America. Actually, Gergen hastened to say with bland audacity: "I'm not a Republican. I've always been a registered Independent."

On June 7, standing at the podium in the White House press room where he had often spoken on behalf of Republican Presidents, Gergen was asked to define his politics more fully. His answer was marvelous for its accidental revelation of the heart of the man. When he first went to work for Richard Nixon in 1971, he had been a registered Democrat. Later, under Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, he had voted Republican, worked in Republican political campaigns and served as the public defender of Republican policies. But he characterized this as a matter more sartorial than ideological: "wearing Republican cloth." Leaving the Reagan White House in 1984 to begin a career at the more rarefied levels of journalism (a fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, a stint as editor and later as columnist for U.S. News & World Report, and a regular spot as a commentator on "The MacNeil/ Lehrer Newshour"), he had "thought it was important" that he "not be seen as a, quote, 'Republican.' " And so he had "evolved" into "an independent voice" that was "moderately right of center."

In most places, this sort of performance could win one a reputation for opportunism. It does that in Washington too, but here the tag is meant as a compliment. Possessing a large degree of what the Washington columnist and talk-television star Michael Kinsley has called "intellectual, uh, flexibility" is no sin here. Wrong lies in the opposite direction, in the gaucherie of displaying passionately held convictions. (Stage passion is fine, but it is crucial to know the difference. The real anger displayed by the Republican strategist Mary Matalin during the 1992 Presidential campaign was considered such a breach of manners that her boss, the deep-insider George Bush, forced her to apologize. Meanwhile, the faux tantrums of Matalin's boyfriend, the Democratic strategist James Carville, won him admiring fame.) A man like Gergen, unafraid to admit that his loyalties and convictions are no more than outerwear, is always welcome at the table.