". . . Because he's just my bill"
FERGUSON, ANDREW
_Books ^Arts_ "...Because He's Just My Bill" Dick Morris, Inadvertent Truth-Teller By Andrew Ferguson Iwas about to write that Dick Morris's memoir, published last week, was "long awaited," but...
...Clinton liked the idea, if it were coupled with a program encouraging sexual abstinence...
...If he feels the force is with him, he'll wait for the force to produce results...
...I'm most concerned about Kentucky and Tennessee...
...Morris discovered that 60 percent of Americans supported handing out condoms in high schools...
...It is a splendid story, worth repeating...
...Their collaboration began in Arkansas, early in both their careers...
...I like them...
...Readers will have to decide for themselves how far to trust Morris's innocent tone...
...Contrast this picture of Lott with the president's picture of himself...
...At first Clinton didn't much like the idea...
...And who is fooling whom...
...But it was a mistake because so many of you were hurt by it...
...Clinton may not have become the father of his country, but even so, 1996 was a year of amazing transformations...
...Behind the Oval Office is too dry, too pedantic in its political detail, to make a great popular success, and its near-total silence on the deliriously tawdry scandal that brought Morris low guarantees that it will be ignored by the mass of readers it needs to turn a profit...
...His testimonies to Clinton's political courage sound like Macaulay extolling Horatius at the Tiber bridge, if Macaulay had been a semi-literate political consultant...
...No again...
...But the president again was wary...
...And he had stayed within his principles...
...Even under the kindest interpretation, the levels of guile here are dizzying...
...I left messages...
...It seemed an issue made in focus-group heaven, almost too good to be true: Handguns + wife-beaters = a winner...
...Books ^Arts_ "...Because He's Just My Bill" Dick Morris, Inadvertent Truth-Teller By Andrew Ferguson Iwas about to write that Dick Morris's memoir, published last week, was "long awaited," but then I remembered that it's scarcely four months since he contracted to write the book...
...Nowhere, however, does Morris mention the president's feet...
...Then perhaps one of those police-union confabs the president so enjoyed...
...I will not have decisions that I make'—his fist now pounding his chair arm, keeping time with his words—'that take guts, that take courage, where I'm really risking everything, and have them transformed into'—his lips curling into a sneer—'seamy, seedy, political decisions ...'" And so on...
...This story, like so much of the book, is offered to us with seeming insouciance, as if Morris isn't quite aware of what the words mean—as if he doesn't know that he has confirmed, yet again, the picture of a president afraid even to draw a breath without the approval of polls...
...Conventional wisdom has its own accounting for this comeback: Buoyed by a strong economy, the president adopted the essence of his adversaries' popular agenda...
...Is Morris lying to us, or was Clinton lying to Morris...
...Morris is unclear whether this is a profile in courage or another instance of the president's "pragmatism...
...You should have seen his face...
...A swing-voter vacation...
...For four years, rumors have circulated about the ferocity of these presidential temper tantrums, and Morris's book piles example upon vivid example...
...This deeply impressed Morris, who is impressionable...
...But then days go by and the president doesn't call...
...He also felt that a value-added tax was dishonest...
...1993: "The president was livid because a story had leaked on April 15 that he was considering a value-added tax...
...Both men, of course, are famously and strenuously heterosexual, but it must be said that the author's account verges on the homoerotic...
...So florid is his praise that he occasionally sounds like Bill Clinton talking about himself...
...They can get out books so quickly now...
...Soon the president was shown survey data from each tobacco state that demonstrated such a position would actually help him...
...What should I do?' He knows that already...
...He is a smart man, or at least a man with an energetic intelligence, but as a memoirist he is not particularly self-aware...
...It is of a piece with his account of negotiating budget-cutting provisions in the welfare bill with Senate majority leader Trent Lott...
...In long expository passages, he strives to convince us of Bill Clinton's prodigious virtues—his lack of vanity, his depth of feeling, his indifference to political calculation...
...You never have to pan this stream too long to find a glittering nugget...
...If he feels things are moving against him, he'll usually wait then too...
...I wanted more and more and more...
...But then Morris runs up against the hard evidence of his own anecdotes...
...But where does euphemism end and outright mendacity begin...
...He may not be a snap decisionmaker, but "he has an almost Oriental way of waiting until the forces move, as they naturally will, in the direction he prefers...
...I could never have scripted those lines...
...But the voters would feel that they had heard an apology when he apologized for their pain...
...And sure enough, "the more he presented himself as America's father, the more he became it...
...Once more, the president's steel hardened...
...Even when the polls were with him, the president would not necessarily act...
...By his own account, Morris was floored...
...I called you as soon as I got rid of those guys," he says into the phone...
...I put new substance and ideas before the voters...
...From the Ozarks, our first Zen president...
...After all, we are here in the funhouse world of "spin"—itself a favorite Washington euphemism for "lie," or, more charitably, "shading the truth...
...But with Dick Morris's coaching, Bill Clinton became a man Dick Morris could love—and a man the country could tolerate...
...I was amazed, just amazed," he recalls...
...Morris is at pains to refute the notion that Clinton is, as the phrase goes, "poll-driven...
...How about a meeting of the NAACP...
...And worse, it left the approval ratings untouched...
...They often convey the impression that he has decided something when he hasn't: "If he 'reversed' the decision he had actually never made he was accused of flip-flopping...
...His housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, worried about alienating rural voters...
...He didn't return the calls...
...There's one every few pages, popping up when you, and apparently the author, least expect it...
...To the Munchkin-sized pollster, the president looms as a "Sequoia": "six feet two inches of oozing charm...
...I called Clinton day after day...
...Polling, of course, was at its heart...
...This is not spin...
...At first, the president keeps their relationship secret from his staff...
...It's hard to admire, much less love, a man so consumed in moral vanity...
...Occasionally, Morris raises the art of euphemism to unprecedented heights...
...Clinton has bags under his eyes...
...It is a useful and revealing book nonetheless—extraordinarily rich, in fact, and far richer, I imagine, than Morris and his subject, the president of the United States, realize...
...And he advanced a series of bite-sized initiatives like school uniforms and juvenile curfews, which, while essentially meaningless, nevertheless repudiated the left-wing meandering of his first two years and solidified his reformed image as a cultural conservative...
...Clinton had been defeated for reelection after his first term as governor, largely because he had doubled car-license fees...
...Dick Morris knows the reason: "He doesn't articulate his responsibility because his mind is so filled with self-criticism...
...At our next meeting, the president approved the idea...
...Morris recounts a couple of not terribly funny presidential wisecracks about his pollster's overambitious polling...
...But action was not always so easy...
...Morris had conducted a massive national survey to identify the swing voters the president would need for reelection, and he put the data in service of deciding how the commander in chief should recreate...
...There goes the wife-beating cop vote...
...The incident is noteworthy not only for its childishness but also for the president's apparent belief that he created new jobs...
...In spirit they were twins, Morris writes, but "what wasn't the same were our bodies...
...But then the passages end and we run headlong into an anecdote that proves quite the opposite...
...It's time," Morris told Clinton in 1996, "to be almost the nation's father, to speak as the father of the country, not as a peer and certainly not as its child...
...He wouldn't apologize...
...Clinton himself publicly raised the possibility of a value-added tax in early 1993, at a town meeting in Ohio...
...Morris describes an Oval Office meeting in -BABOTH MEN ARE STRENUOUSLY HETEROSEXUAL, BUT MORRIS'S ACCOUNT VERGES ON THE HOMOEROTIC...
...No: too racially sensitive...
...He was delighted that he could savage them, delighted...
...But "in public Clinton is deeply emotional...
...I take the general themes from the candidate and then find new specific issues to illustrate them...
...This is spin...
...Morris writes: "'That's the first vacation I've taken that didn't help me in the polls,' Clinton said irritably upon his return...
...The relationship was—is—unique, if only because two men of such character have never before operated successfully from the White House...
...He devotes a long chapter to those bite-sized, culturally conservative initiatives that characterized the winning campaign...
...One can see here the birth of Clintonism as we have come to know it...
...He wants to know how to get there, and he uses a poll to help him find out...
...Sometimes it is hell being a New Democrat, especially a courageous one...
...Some people have questioned the sincerity of the president's frequent public displays of emotion, as when Clinton was inconveniently filmed leaving Ron Brown's memorial service wiping away a non-existent tear...
...The president is often accused of "flip-flopping," as we know...
...The tantrums sometimes approach the kind normally associated with autistic children—except in the president's case they are overlaid with self-righteousness and megalomania...
...Senior Editor Andrew Ferguson's book of essays, Fools' Names, Fools' Faces, is out in hardcover from Atlantic Monthly Press...
...Well, it's a bit of a letdown after George Washington...
...But Clinton agreed to film the ad with his own words...
...One of their conversations was so important that Morris relates it three times...
...They remind me of JFK...
...He talked about the idea as late as May 27...
...Reading the polls, Morris recommended a commercial in which the candidate would apologize for the fee increase...
...He wouldn't lie...
...Soulfully he addressed the camera: "When I became governor we had serious problems with our streets and roads, and I did support those [car-license fee] increases to solve the problems...
...Or maybe substance became spin...
...The problem, Morris explains, arises from leaks...
...Morris was paid a $2.5 million advance...
...But don't get the wrong idea: "Bill Clinton uses polls in an important and unique way...
...The pollsters went to work...
...This is not just another stretch of the president's imagination, like his pronouncement a few years ago that he was more familiar with farming than any previous president (forgetting such professional farmers as Jefferson, Jackson, Truman, et al...
...Camping out," Morris concluded, "was a favorite for swing voters...
...Clinton, citing a vague commitment to "principle," refused to apologize...
...I need those states...
...Only when all else fails does he take direct, personal action...
...It's substance...
...This passion explains why Morris is always, for public purposes anyway, willing to extend the president the benefit of the doubt...
...Is the president indecisive, as detractors have claimed...
...Many of the firsthand glimpses we are offered of him in Behind the Oval Office have him losing his temper over such talk...
...The strategy reached its perfection in 1995 and 1996, when the matched pair orchestrated perhaps the greatest political resuscitation in American history...
...And as the books come, so can they go...
...as a Texan, he understood the electoral prowess of crackers who slug their wives...
...There are volcanic rages, despairing estrangements, abject apologies, sighing reconciliations...
...It's very likely unique in American history for a relationship like this to exist...
...As Morris writes: "We were a match...
...If nothing else, it was the year, to borrow Morris's terminology, when spin became substance...
...I know we both have a duty to talk about this relationship," the president told him...
...Morris reveled in the relationship...
...He was red-faced as he yelled...
...Morris agrees with the conventional wisdom, but his elaboration of it is definitive, even discounting for the self-aggrandizement that invariably enters in...
...Police groups [said] they might not endorse Clinton because many policemen might be affected by this proposal...
...I deserved the ribbing," Morris writes sheepishly...
...The president should camp out...
...It's not the way many suppose it to be: 'What should I be for...
...And try as he might, he cannot obscure the essential cynicism of the enterprise...
...On those rare moments when he comes truly alive in Behind the Oval Office, the president is red-faced...
...He agreed to reform welfare and balance the federal budget in seven years...
...One incident in particular suggested to Morris the immensity of his client's gifts...
...In his ad, the future president had fudged (he not only "supported those increases," he rammed them through the legislature...
...No matter...
...He loved cutting off children," Clinton shouted to Morris...
...I felt intoxicated," Morris says...
...The announcement "soon faded...
...Where to make the formal announcement was a dicier question...
...What about the NRA...
...Welllll . . . "In private he is more shy and reserved, usually keeping his feelings within...
...And then, at last, the president does call: "A fix, rushing, warming, stimulating, enticing, addicting...
...Lincoln and Clinton, it seemed to me, had a lot in common...
...The president's worries, Morris found, "had no basis in political reality...
...But in the end they decided to scuttle the proposal—unless support rose above 70 percent...
...Clinton was determined not to raise taxes again that year...
...When the president "reaches out" to him, it "soothes my hurt...
...Sometimes, it is the president who is hurt: "I get the sense," Clinton pouts, "that you're not interested in talking about Whitewater with me...
...And I'm really sorry about that...
...Plus it tells him where he's going on his summer vacation...
...There has been talk—surely you've heard it— that the president avoids taking responsibility for his mistakes...
...Who can blame him...
...As a political consultant, Morris is a master manipulator of surfaces, and in Bill Clinton he found his perfect politician...
...This discontinuity is all the stranger given the self-consciousness of the relationship between the two men...
...Whatever...
...You will recall how he "took on" the fearsome tobacco companies...
...When George Stephanopoulos mentions that White House staffers object to a bill the president is about to sign, Clinton erupts: "Well, I get a vote, don't I? I mean, I'm the president so I get a vote, don't I? Don't I? If there are people here who don't like it, well, I've created seven and half million new jobs and maybe it's time for them to go out and take some of them...
...I don't spin anything...
...Morris understands: "He wanted to keep me for himself and not share me with his staff...
...Amazingly, his courage rose...
...The pollsters took to the phone banks once more...
...Clinton acted," Morris concludes with a flourish...
...At times it's almost as if the Duke and the Dauphin had been lifted from the pages of Huckleberry Finn and handed the reins of power...
...Reporters like to use the word 'spin' to describe what political consultants do," Morris writes...
...He dragged his family to a national park, where they hiked and slept in tents, and where the president himself could be photographed jiggling in his Izod shirt astride some loping, sedated steed...
...To show the president's lighter side, for example, Morris discusses plans for a Clinton family vacation in 1995...
...It'll cost me whatever chance I had in North Carolina," he told Morris...
...As this book proves, it was the year when many people could no longer distinguish between the two...
...Each story is intended to paint a miniature profile in courage—a cameo in courage, you might say—in which the president rises above partisan interests to do what's right "for the people...
...Crunch, crunch went the numbers...
...He had misled (he said he was sorry but, somehow, wasn't...
...And he had found a consultant who could watch it all and still testify that Bill Clinton "had stayed within his principles...
...But the most startling point is quickly passed over: The president did, in fact, camp out...
...The president, of course, hates the suggestion that he is unwilling to take risks, that he refuses to make courageous decisions...
...One of the more curious of the bite-sized issues was a proposal to ban the sale of handguns to persons convicted of domestic violence...
...Clinton told Morris that "when he has to do things that hurt the poor— like budget cuts or welfare reform— he suffers physically with headaches and stomachaches...
...He was determined to run again...
...I fought hard to extend the values agenda," Morris writes, "to include a ban on advertising tobacco products to teenagers...
...The president was incredulous: "This was carrying things too far...
Vol. 2 • January 1997 • No. 19
