Behind the Oval Office / Bad Boy
Morris, Dick & Brady, John
Bad Boys All Around and That Missing Touch of Evil Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties DickMorris Random House /359 pages / $25.95 Bad Boy: The Life and Politics...
...Lee Atwater," one South Carolina Democrat had warned Dukakis, "is the premier negative strategist in American politics...
...It was possible, for example, for Atwater to move over the years from Strom Thurmond to Ronald Reagan to George Bush...
...When he arrived on the national scene his sights were set, says Brady, on winning at all costs...
...though after reading Dick Morris's masturbatory autobiography, I think it's possible, if not likely, that Bill Clinton's foot-noshing campaign guru sees himself as a civilian model of George S. Patton, the eternal warrior who claimed to have lived and fought at Carthage and Waterloo...
...In this age of celebrity campaign handlers we need a new kind of arithmetic...
...Let's talk business...
...Not that spin itself is anything new in American politics...
...A]fter Lott and I chatted about how he could win over the people who had voted against him [for Republican whip], he shifted in his high-backed Senate office chair and said: 'I don't need you to tell me what to do in the Senate...
...from Behind the Oval Office, by Dick Morris j ust kidding...
...The polls say Dewey is a cinch, that he's already picked his Cabinet...
...Bad Boys All Around and That Missing Touch of Evil Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties DickMorris Random House /359 pages / $25.95 Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater John Brady Addison Wesley /33o pages / $24 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold He was slumped at his desk when I entered the Oval Office, his face haggard, his hand clammy when I shook it...
...M orris, however, is unique to his profession...
...For Nixon, the crime was his pursuit of a "Southern strategy," i.e...
...He told a journalist that his motivation for winning was "to show the Harvard crowdthat a redneck from South Carolina could come out on top...
...Stop feeling sorry for yourself Okay, Henry Wallace and the radical Left are going one way, the goddamn Dixiecrats another...
...Though fond of quoting Sun-tzu, his real model was Marion the Swamp Fox...
...I shook him harshly, violently...
...Who am Ito doubt the transcendental life force of an operator who can build a career bridge between his client Bill Clinton and his client Trent Lott...
...I should never have taken that Brit account and left him on his own...
...Talk about the good-for-nothing 8oth Congress...
...Impressed...
...Like Dick Morris, he was a relentless self-promoter who excelled at feeding information about campaign strategy, tactics, and intrigues to reporters...
...That he did...
...Cut the crap," I said, getting straight to the point...
...The situation called for drastic action...
...There's more, on Medicare, welfare reform, Haiti, the State of the Union...
...Spin doctors who work for the likes of Ronald Reagan and George Bush learn, sooner or later, that they have fewer friends in the Washington press corps than they think...
...I had worked for candidates in forty different states since my start...
...In late June, the allies announced a new policy on air strikes...
...T]he president got what he wanted from Chirac and Major...
...At this particular moment in history I had a blubbering President of the United States on my hands, whining about how he was in over his head, and maybe he'd have been better off just staying home in Missouri, living VICTOR GOLD is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...What do you want, what do you need...
...In 1988, at age 37, Lee Atwater was George Bush's presidential campaign manager...
...Going back to Nixon 1968, it has been a given among most Washington journalists that no Republican can be elected president without a large measure of moral perfidy...
...Like those who follow the harvest, I moved around the country, according to a season schedule...of political primaries 78 April .1997 The American Spectator and elections," writes Morris...
...He stared at me impassively, through tear-stained bi-focals...
...Well, why not...
...I suggested that he get Chirac on board by appealing to the new French president's desire to show a firm military hand...
...How many times in your life do you get a chance to knock off a Winston Churchill...
...What else do you want to talk about?' I got the hint and brought him up-to-date on my moves inside the White House...
...Why quibble...
...Most spin doctors, like the late Lee Atwater, purvey their guile on only one side of the street...
...Big mistake...
...Get your nerve back," I said through clenched teeth...
...Forty clients, including, Morris tells us, such mixed ideological bookends as Bella Abzug and Jesse Helms...
...But what the hell...
...What bulls--t...
...Once he got Chirac, Major would probably follow...
...I put my hands on his arms and jerked him to his feet...
...But you know what I say...
...k Oh, for a touch of that "evil" four years later...
...I kept the president well-informed of my dealings with Lott," writes Morris, "and with the president's full knowledge, I kept Lott informed of the president's thinking...
...Whether r George Bush could have won in that year, given the bleak economic climate, is debatable...
...Now I had to start all over again, Square One...
...Four-timing is more like it...
...When I got into politics," Atwater once told reporter David Remnick, "the establishment was all Democrats, and I was anti-establishment...
...Like when he first took over, telling the press corps, "Fellas, pray for me...
...By autumn of 1992, Lee Atwater was dead, Slick Willie was rolling, and the Bush presidential campaign was being run by a sanhedrin of number-crunchers and Yankee stuffed-shirts...
...I wrote a first draft on my laptop and faxed it to the White House residence at ten in the evening, Washington time—four o'clock in the morning for me in Paris...
...0i4 in The American Spectator • April 1997 79...
...seeking votes among the same racists and segregationists who had formerly supported Democrats, from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, with no appreciable notice, much less criticism, from the moral press...
...but only in recent years has the art of packaging candidates and causes become an industry that generates, according to the trade magazine Campaigns & Elections, some $8 billion annually for over 7,000 spin doctors...
...I called the usher's office in the residence and asked someone there to be sure the president got it...
...What do you say...
...Twelve years later, we wer told of Reagan's nefarious "October surprise," an imagined plot that put William Casey and George Bush in Madrid mid-campaign, to cut a deal with the Ayatollah on the Tehran hostage crisis...
...True...
...But inconstant though he was in many things—in private as well as public life—the subject of John Brady's biography Bad Boy had ideological roots that limited his range of operations...
...And they called Nixon "Tricky Dick...
...True or not, that was the reputation that George Bush's political director would take to his grave, if only because it was easier for choleric liberals like Colorado's Pat Schroeder to explain their candidate's loss in those terms than concede that voters wouldn't buy the idea of a self-described "card-carrying ACLU member" in the Oval Office...
...But as John Brady concludes, a redneck from South Carolina in his corner wouldn't have hurt, Patricia Schroeder's choler to the contrary...
...Give 'em hell, Harry...
...Indeed it was Schroeder who, after the election, summed up the sentiments of the party of compassion and civility by telling reporters, "Lee Atwater is probably the most evil man in America...
...When Congress began its new season in January1995, I visited Lott in his Senate office," Morris tells us...
...They certainly hadn't captured mine...
...Atwater knew things they didn't teach at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government from his training as a good ol' boy who loved wrestling and soul music...
...The billing was exaggerated, but Atwater loved it...
...It's been too long, Dick," he said...
...After Bush's election, he vaulted over a dozen of his elders to become not only chairman of the Republican National Committee but a media superstar billed by the press as the president's chief political strategist...
...Howard Metzenbaum and Dan Coats...
...Snap out of it," I said...
...If, that is, we can believe half of what Dick Morris says about his work behind the Oval Office, advising his client on matters ranging from budget deals to Bosnia: I told the president that rather than proceed at the foreign-secretary level, he should...deal directly with Chirac and Major to negotiate new rules for air strikes...
...I resented the way the left wing claimed to have captured the hearts and minds of American youth...
...Atwater was a rebel, the product of a South Carolina political culture that features campaigning as a form of guerrilla entertainment...
...Clinton still talks to Morris, as does Lott, which tells us the essential truth about the state of the union in the Age of Spin...
...But for that, according to the myth, Jimmy Carter might have beaten Reagan in 198o, just as Michael Dukakis could have defeated Bush in 1988, if it hadn't been for Lee Atwater's squalid talent for dirty campaign tricks...
...It had been a long time since anyone had talked to him like that, but he had to be snapped out of his self-pity, a thing he fell into all too easily...
...In a way it was my own damn fault...
...I'll never forget telling Clem Attlee But that's another story...
...I say you pick your ass up, get on a train and whistlestop the country...
...The young Democrats were all the guys running around in three-piece suits, smoking cigars and cutting deals, so I said, 'Hell, I'm a Republican.' But much more of it was a response to what was going on in the early 'dos...
...Tom Ridge and David Pryor: testimony to the author's dazzling genius or, more likely, the enduring truth of George Wallace's dictum that there ain't a dime's worth of difference between the parties (a candidate and line that Morris, for some reason, doesn't claim...
...Half an hour later, after I'd gone to bed, the desk clerk called to announce that Clinton was calling...
...It took me a year to pull him off that poor-little-me tack and make him understand that the American people want a leader, not a whiner...
...But wait: Let's not jump to conclusions...
...winning he would savor all the more because it would come at the expense of the Yankee stuffed-shirts...
...Fortunately, he got the message, and things changed in short order...
...Or, as they prefer to be called, campaign consultants, a breed the author archly describes as "America's highest paid migrant workers"—giving new meaning to the term stoop labor...
...No, Dick," he replied...
...I've missed you...
...It wasn't that Morris was two-timinghis client in the Oval Office...
...out his days as a haberdasher...
Vol. 30 • April 1997 • No. 4
