There’s a certain symmetry to the Morris story, and to the Clinton campaign he has done so much to resurrect. As Republicans love to point out, last week was not the first time the word ““prostitute’’ has been mentioned in connection with the name Dick Morris. In a universe where every other political consultant has to choose a party to work for, Morris got away with advising politicians ranging all the way from Howard Metzenbaum to Jesse Helms, as long as they paid the bills. Left, right, hard, soft – whatever the customer’s pleasure.
It would be easy now to laugh at his high-board belly flop into an empty swimming pool. It would be easy, as Nixon once said, but it would be wrong, and not just out of compassion for Morris’s wife. In today’s hype-addled world, the word ““brilliant’’ is tossed around too casually; Nexis turns up more than 100 references in the press each day, and 99 of them are inaccurate. But in this rare case, the adjective is right. Morris is brilliant – when he’s not being stupid. The ideas just pour out of him: seven out of 10 are useless, one or two are dangerous, one or two are insights of political genius. Over the years, Bill Clinton has learned to figure out which are which. The ones that the president adopted are not only fueling his campaign, they are changing the country.
Morris’s influence is misunderstood. He did not originate the ““opportunity, responsibility, community’’ framework (““Rotary Club sloganeering that almost makes you puke,’’ San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown calls it, standing tall for the cynics). These New Democrat ideas were precisely the organizing principles of Clinton’s announcement speech in 1991, which was written without Morris. And after the 1994 election, Clinton hardly needed Morris to tell him to move to the center; Socks the cat could have figured that one out.
The problem was how to move to the center. Even here much of Morris’s advice was not taken. He wanted a budget deal – and didn’t get it. He is credited with having ““won’’ on welfare, but his voice was not decisive. Clinton didn’t need Morris to make the political case for signing the bill; the polls made it obvious.
Where Morris was so creative was on so-called small issues – the tiny bricks used to construct Clinton’s bridge to the future. ““The strength of Dick’s ideas is that they feel real – they feel relevant,’’ George Stephanopoulos, hardly Morris’s most ardent admirer, said last week. Starting with the 1995 State of the Union address, Morris understood that what looks trivial to the press and political types is not small at all to many Americans. It turns out that people care a lot more about new mothers’ being able to stay longer than 48 hours in the hospital and about tobacco marketing aimed at children than they do about ““the issues’’ as Washington defines them.
The hard thing for hard-bitten media types to accept is that Morris may be right substantively as well as politically – that arranging for the private sector to distribute 50,000 cell phones to crime-watch groups may do a lot more to stop crime than some big bill. On his preconvention train trip, Clinton’s best applause line came when he mentioned his proposal for a million volunteers to make sure every American child can read by the third grade. This is a big goal – almost a JFK, let’s-go-to-the-moon goal. Its ripple effects would transform education.
When they heard about it in Chicago, 15,000 press folk yawned. We are obviously far more interested in toe-sucking than in teen curfews and breast-cancer research and keeping guns out of the hands of wife beaters and the option to use overtime to accumulate time off instead of time-and-a-half pay (a huge change for anyone punching a clock) and all of the other ideas Clinton has advanced. No matter. The message gets through anyway.
One nickname for Morris inside the campaign was ““the Unabomber’’; his control freakishness knew no bounds. But the reason he won’t be missed has nothing to do with internal squabbling. He won’t be missed because even his worst enemies are now committed to advancing his strategy. All that was lacking was some metaphor that could pull together the long list of ““real people’’ issues; just about any metaphor would do. As it happened, Bob Dole provided it in San Diego by describing himself as a ““bridge to the past.’’ So Clinton now has his own bridge, and it’s headed in a much more politically appealing direction.
The president’s plan is to play ““rope-a-dope,’’ the Muhammad Ali strategy of letting his opponent tire himself out with glancing blows. Dole seems to be complying. He will spend much of his time proving he is more trustworthy than Clinton, which won’t be difficult. The problem for Dole is that presidential elections are only partly about the candidates. They are also about the country. Voters may trust one man personally, and trust the other to fight for them and their interests. The latter is a more potent trust. Dick Morris looks like a fool, or worse, but if Clinton wins, history will be kinder. He helped the president find a way to campaign and govern closer to where people really live.
