President Bill Clinton
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Saint Anselm College

During a discussion on This Week this morning about the Hillary Clinton campaign, ABC News reporter Claire Shipman cited poll numbers showing that 66% of Americans were happy with the job President Bill Clinton did, that a majority thought Hillary would chart a different course than her husband, and that was okay, and they felt comfortable with Bill back in the White House.

"Everyone was talking about Clinton Fatigue," Shipman said.

No. You were talking about Clinton Fatigue. You, and all of your Beltway journalism colleagues.

This is one of my absolute biggest annoyances with national political reporting: The herd mentality. It was clear to me from the start that when I kept hearing these DC political pundits saying that the country has got Clinton Fatigue, what they were really saying was that they had Clinton Fatigue.

So the national press ran with it; it was an assertion that was bandied about as if it were fact but unsupported by any facts.

There are plenty of national political reporters who do a fine job but they are all creatures of their own environment and therefore susceptible to it. The fact that Clinton Fatigue was a major theme in the reporting of the presidential race for quite some time, illustrates just how insular the DC press has become.

Who, after all, do the national political correspondents talk to all day? Themselves and their inside-the-beltway sources. They live in a rhetorical echo chamber that is often far removed from the sentiment of the rest of the country.

Turns out, according to these recent poll numbers, there is no Clinton Fatigue. It never existed. Except in the collective mind of our national press corps.