Few political operatives in the US enjoy a reputation as tawdry as Dick Morris, pioneer of the use of ‘focus groups’ for devising candidate platforms. Hired by Clinton mid-way through his first term to rescue his prospect of re-election, Morris devised ‘triangulation’ as the winning strategy to foil his likely opponent, Dole. Playing to Clinton’s own instincts, he counselled him to jettison all pretence of commitment to a traditional Democratic agenda, even the watered-down version on which he had campaigned in 1992, and take over much of the substance of the Republican legislative programme instead. Calculating that two-fifths of all voters were in the ‘independent middle’ of the electorate, Morris targeted this centre, reckoning that by stealing the Republicans’ clothes, Clinton would drive them further to the right in search of some still distinctive Presidential apparel.
He was well placed to urge this manoeuvre, as a long-time mercenary willing to serve either party, provided the fee was large enough. Most of his recent work had been for Republicans: Trent Lott, Senate leader from Mississippi, was a key client. In 1995–96 his message to his two patrons was to bury the hatchet. If Clinton and Lott would come together to crack down on crime, reform welfare, erode immigrant rights, devolve federal responsibilities and the like, Clinton could keep the White House and Lott continue to command Capitol Hill. Politics could be confined to narrow limits.
Morris’s strategy gave Clinton the winning formula for the 1996 race, though massive doses of corrupt finance, extracted from donors all the way from New York or Chicago to Djakarta and Beijing, were a vital lubricant of victory. Morris himself, however, did not survive to enjoy its fruits. During the Democratic Convention, it emerged that he had been in the habit of lolling in bed with a paid concubine while on the line to the President, and passing the phone across the pillow for her to savour important exchanges on domestic and state affairs. Evidently, prostitution was an attraction not to be confined to politics. The symbolism of the affair was too pointed, and Morris had to resign. The next year, he cashed his time under Clinton into a standard narrative of service with the President, Behind the Oval Office, complete with a lachrymose letter to his wife begging for forgiveness, and unctuous tributes to his master: ‘The press has given me much credit for President Clinton’s triumph in 1996. It will become obvious throughout this narrative that the mind behind the victory was that of President William Jefferson Clinton.’
At the same time, Morris took the opportunity, with feigned regret, to lace his tributes to Clinton’s accomplishments with insinuations that all was not quite well in the White House. There was a ‘Saturday Night Bill’ whose conduct, albeit in private, was at odds with the regal ‘Sunday Morning Bill’ of public office. By bringing this into the open, Morris assured his readers, he was helping to save Clinton from himself. For whatever his peccadilloes, ‘history will in time dig beneath the scandals and retrieve his record of achievement for the American people. What he has done to help the United States and its citizens is too sweeping and too profound to remain buried for all time.’