THE DICK MORRIS DEMOCRATS
THE DICK MORRIS DEMOCRATS Had there never been so much as a hint of sordid sex-play involving President Clinton’s now-departed chief strategist, Dick Morris would still be the biggest news from...
...Two days earlier, paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve and gunshot victim Jim Brady had appeared on stage...
...And with Chicago ’96—the worst, most vulgar, most corrosively cynical political convention in American history—a sitting president and his entire Democratic army have thoroughly submitted themselves to Morrisism...
...But each was designed to disguise the real character of partisanship, not explain it...
...But there is something particularly comical, almost delusional, about the way those questions have so far been answered in the present instance—about the way Morrisgate has been justifi ed as “legitimate” news...
...But he never called them “Republicans,” and he rigorously avoided the word “Democrat” from start to fi nish, too...
...That’s not the basis of his appeal to the American people,” the president’s press secretary acknowledged the day of his speech...
...a man for whom the stylized warfare of politics, and the manipulation of its vote-grabbing techniques, is everything...
...There is nothing else...
...So went the Chicago convention for four nights, up to and including all 66 minutes of the president’s workmanlike but fundamentally anti-political acceptance speech...
...So Dick Morris is a hypo crite...
...Hillary Clinton’s breathtakingly arrogant explanation of how it “takes Bill Clinton” in the White House “to raise a happy, healthy and hopeful child” in today’s America contained not a single explicitly partisan word...
...He is the compleat modern mercenary: a “Republican” one week, a “Democrat” the next...
...They should be like Bill...
...The second term Clinton is now forecasting is poll-driven vote-bait, not a determined bid for history...
...Judging from the Chicago convention, and what it reveals about Bill Clinton’s presidency and the Democratic party as an institution, the answer is yes, he is that important...
...The vice president referred to his own party only by implication, and only for a moment...
...On purpose...
...Vice President Gore repeatedly vowed that he and Clinton won’t let “them” succeed...
...It has been replaced by an era of big sentiment, small but endless programmatic busywork, and inarticulate identity politics...
...With Dick Morris, the role of the professional strategist in American politics rises to the level of pure caricature...
...And we would never much have cared to know the minor offi cial secrets Morris is accused of “betraying” to the lady...
...But we knew that already...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...they need not think like him or act in support of Democratic ideas...
...And so on...
...For them, the era of robust, meaningful big government does seem genuinely over...
...THE DICK MORRIS DEMOCRATS Had there never been so much as a hint of sordid sex-play involving President Clinton’s now-departed chief strategist, Dick Morris would still be the biggest news from the Chicago Democratic convention...
...Jesse Jackson’s argument in behalf of Clinton’s reelection, for example: “Well, what is the alternative...
...In that speech, Clinton all but wrote off his party’s chance to retake Congress in November...
...Dick Morris has been whisked from view...
...Gore did drip gallons of acid on Senator Dole and Speaker Gingrich, depicting them as cold-hearted nasties you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry...
...Americans are now asked to choose Clinton in November as they might choose a pair of designer sneakers...
...a man who not only ignores the elevated aspects of partisanship, but actively disdains them as counterproductive to victory...
...Democratic party co-chairman Christopher Dodd, renominating the president, didn’t use the term “Democrat” at all...
...The world’s oldest political party is a disgraceful husk of its former self...
...Whenever it is busy stoning to death a political career like Morris’s, American journalism asks itself, as it no doubt should, some Very Diffi cult Questions...
...Two of four evenings in Chicago were most notably devoted to brutally direct, argument-killing invocations of personal tragedy...
...No major convention speaker aggressively proposed the restoration of a Democratic congressional majority that might make possible some theoretically ambitious Clintonite politics...
...The Democratic party no longer pretends to be a vehicle for the advancement of a serious American political agenda...
...Is Dick Morris really so important...
...Forget the hooker...
...And the Democrats, they told us with unusual unanimity in Chicago, will be satisfi ed with that...
...He has been measured against standards of private behavior generally applied only to actual public offi cials and candidates, the people in politics of greatest symbolic and substantive signifi cance...
...As long as he is president, he promised, “I will never allow the Republican leadership to use the blackmail threat...
...They have deliberately forsworn the effort to address the largest questions in American public life...
...And that is the scandal...
...If he wins, he will devote himself to a series of eensie-weensie tax credits and a mind-numbingly long list of on-the-cheap federal solutions to problems most Americans probably aren’t aware they even have...
...Let’s face it: Had his confi dant been Bob Woodward instead of a call girl, Morris would still be on the job...
...He will march in place against the Republican party...
...The country will move a few inches here or there for four long years...
...While allegedly consorting with a prostitute, the man has helped the president reposition himself as an advocate of family values...
...Brady’s wife Sarah told us that her wheelchair-bound husband’s misfortune is not “a Democratic or a Republican problem...
...And the story would still be a scandal...
...Vice President Gore deoxygenated the United Center for ten agonizing minutes with an emotional and (though you are not allowed to say so) exploitative description of his sister’s cancer death...
...Reeve whispered that the nation needs “not a Democratic motto, not a Republican motto,” but an “American motto...
...Both men clearly expect “them,” Republicans in a congressional majority, to return in January as convenient foils...
...Foils for what...
...Those few convention speeches that briefl y suggested a fl icker of passion for the party and its liberalism already look like exercises in death-haunted, rearguard spin...
...No, Morris has been run out of town exclusively on grounds of personal tawdriness...
...But he is still there, dominating everything, in mind and spirit...
...They were powerful presences, and the United Center throbbed with empathy for them...
...Keynoter Evan Bayh spoke the D-word . . . once...
Vol. 1 • September 1996 • No. 50
