See Dick Win

WHEN the GOP cut a budget deal with the President, some reports had consultant Dick Morris playing Svengali to both sides. When Trent Lott defended Kelly Flinn, critics speculated the advice must be coming from Morris. In Washington, Dick Morris, like the summer haze, is inescapable; he’s the butt of jokes on Letterman, a fixture on CNN, the most quotable pundit with the deepest store of inside dish. The pervasiveness of Dick Morris says much about the value Washington places on notoriety and self-promotion. But there is another reason for Morris’s staying power—which is, quite simply, that he is brilliant.

His book, Behind the Oval Office, is the best account of the 1996 campaign and the most accurate picture of the Clinton White House to date. It has nonetheless been dismissed by Right and Left alike. Ask Republican operatives if they have read Morris’s book, and they’re likely to look as if you’ve asked them if they’ve ever handled the medical garbage that sometimes washes up on the Jersey shore. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to attack Morris as an unprincipled self-promoter who peddles a drastic misreading of the 1996 elections-at best. According to Garry Wills, writing in The New York Review of Books, “Dick Morris is not only the dark side of Bill Clinton. He is the dark side of our whole political system.”

About the Author

Rich Lowry

Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.

Featured Tags

Presidential Election

WHEN the GOP cut a budget deal with the President, some reports had consultant Dick Morris playing Svengali to both sides. When Trent Lott defended Kelly Flinn, critics speculated the advice must be coming from Morris. In Washington, Dick Morris, like the summer haze, is inescapable; he’s the butt of jokes on Letterman, a fixture on CNN, the most quotable pundit with the deepest store of inside dish. The pervasiveness of Dick Morris says much about the value Washington places on notoriety and self-promotion. But there is another reason for Morris’s staying power—which is, quite simply, that he is brilliant.

His book, Behind the Oval Office, is the best account of the 1996 campaign and the most accurate picture of the Clinton White House to date. It has nonetheless been dismissed by Right and Left alike. Ask Republican operatives if they have read Morris’s book, and they’re likely to look as if you’ve asked them if they’ve ever handled the medical garbage that sometimes washes up on the Jersey shore. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to attack Morris as an unprincipled self-promoter who peddles a drastic misreading of the 1996 elections-at best. According to Garry Wills, writing in The New York Review of Books, “Dick Morris is not only the dark side of Bill Clinton. He is the dark side of our whole political system.”