POWER PLAYS
Win or Lose -- How History's Great Political Leaders Play the Game
By Dick Morris
ReganBooks/HarperCollins. 360 pp. $25.95
Horoscopes, broken clocks, Magic Eightballs and Dick Morris can astound us when they're correct. Of these, only Morris, a former campaign adviser for Bill Clinton and now a political analyst for Fox News Channel, gets the book contracts, for which I suppose we should be grateful.
Morris's inconsistency -- rearing its head again in his new book, Power Plays -- is particularly irritating, since his occasional spasms of insight tempt some of us, like rubes at a sidewalk shell game, to stick around waiting for another moment of inspiration. But mostly we end up just wasting time.
Morris's unevenness is easier to take in cable TV news sound bites than it is on paper. In Power Plays, Morris -- using an idea, title and outline conceived by übereditor Judith Regan -- tries to apply sound-bite logic, his predilection for hyperbole and his experience as a political strategist to glean leadership lessons from great historical figures of the last century. Regan's premise is intriguing; presumably any historians she might have lined up for the job were too busy defending themselves against charges of plagiarism to take the assignment.
Dick Morris may be a lot of things -- hyperactive pollster, Machiavellian politically ambidextrous strategist, occasionally astute Bill Clinton observer, embarrassingly eager gladhander, satyr and TV commentator, in no particular order -- but "historian" does not make that list, and his attempts to feign otherwise exasperate the reader. He attributes the results of the 1972 presidential election, for example, solely to the George McGovern running afoul of Democratic bosses over his attempts to reform the party. That McGovern was too liberal to win or that he was going up against an entrenched incumbent obsessed with winning by any means necessary (or any of the other hundred reasons why McGovern's candidacy proved such a disaster) -- these trifles Morris dismisses. After all, he has six "strategies" to recommend in the book, and he needs McGovern for the one explaining How to Reform Your Party, as a counterpoint to the successful examples of Tony Blair and Junichiro Koizumi.
To cite a more recent example, that Al Gore lost the last presidential election specifically because he ran "away from his environmental beliefs," is a classic Morris-ism -- offered in earnest, supported with seemingly scholarly explanation, boldly challenging the predictable blather offered by the punditocracy. For these qualities, I more often than not have been tempted to give Morris the benefit of the doubt where others too quickly write him off. But he's ultimately unconvincing. Sure, Gore waffled on environmental issues, but in the most competitive states that he should have won -- Tennessee and West Virginia, to name but two -- ardent environmentalism is a stark political liability. So Morris pushes it. "If any state in America is environmentalist, it's Florida," he says, as if Jeb Bush were some sort of second coming of John Muir.
Morris credits Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, his Fox compadres, with prodding him into discussing politicians fighting for principle. But as evidenced by his 1997 book Behind the Oval Office, Morris doesn't seem to have a handle on what a "principle" actually is. In that book, he tried -- confoundingly -- to explain Clinton's passion for poll-taking (even on matters as inconsequential as where the First Family should go on vacation) as evidence of his principles. Moreover, Morris described Clinton, when he was a defeated one-term governor of Arkansas, as refusing to apologize for his doubling of car license fees on principle. He then lauded Clinton's subsequent TV ad apology -- "It was a mistake because so many of you were hurt by it" -- as not only some sort of stroke of genius but an adherence to principle, since, with typical worminess, Clinton wasn't actually apologizing for his action but for voters' pain.
In this book, as in that one, it would seem that Morris can fake a knowledge of principle pretty well professionally but in reality has no idea what he's talking about. In describing Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential race, he ultimately concludes that Goldwater lost not because he sold out but because of his stylistic shortcomings, that he "seemed to relish the role of the bad boy." Thus, in a section of the book faulting Goldwater for selling out his beliefs, Morris actually faults him for being true to himself.
Disconnects like that one are maddeningly sprinkled throughout the book. History is a slave to such uncontrollable vectors as timing, happenstance and the economy. Third-party candidates emerge, voters grow apathetic, quirks of fate intervene. But in Dick Morris's world, it all comes down to the one easily categorized bit of advice that he would gladly have offered to the politician in question had he merely been on retainer. Even the Magic Eightball occasionally says "Outlook not so good." Morris doesn't seem capable of such nuance. •
Jake Tapper, a reporter for VH1, writes frequently about politics.
