Fascinating Read: Dick Morris Describes His Role In The Presidential Campaign And His Relationship With Clinton

“Behind The Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the ‘90s” by Dick Morris (Random House, 359 pages, $25.95)

According to Dick Morris, the renowned and fallen presidential political consultant, he may well have committed one of the more public acts of self-destruction in recent history, but he is nonetheless very smart, a genius, when it comes to winning elections.

That is the conclusion that one would have to draw from “Behind the Oval Office,” the combination apology, memoir and advertisement for himself that Morris has spent his time writing since his ignominious resignation as Bill Clinton’s main campaign adviser last year.

Morris, as is well known, stepped down after a prostitute he was seeing in Washington sold the story of their relationship to a supermarket tabloid. He apologizes for that “grave lapse of moral standards,” which he attributes to a misguided effort to salve the pain of the loneliness he felt during his extended sojourns in Washington.

But most of “Behind the Oval Office” is dedicated to a description of the 1996 presidential campaign and to the very close relationship Morris maintained with Clinton as his chief political consultant.

Nobody will accuse Morris of hesitating to take credit for the campaign strategy that won the 1996 election, or more generally to identify himself as the source of a great deal of very shrewd, indispensable political advice. His tendency is to portray the president mired in perplexity and surrounded by staff members making unsound recommendations, the light then dawning after a few chiseled words of Morris’ wisdom.

“Fortunately, he got the message, and things changed in short order,” Morris writes in a typical before-and-after passage. The before in this instance was an episode of flagging presidential courage, which Morris says he remedied by grabbing Clinton by the arms, shaking him violently and shouting “Get your nerve back.”

More often, the advice comes in the form of sharp analyses of what needs to be done. Morris describes the president of the United States saying things like “I’ll get on it right away” after some urgent recommendation from his consultant.

In such fashion does Morris provide many glimpses inside a presidency and a presidential campaign, and that is what makes his book fascinating and even instructive. Some pundits are claiming to be shocked over the mentality he projects, which is essentially that Clinton and his entourage should and did do absolutely nothing - not decide what color tie to wear, much less whether Hillary Rodham Clinton should speak in public - without first weighing the gesture’s effect on public opinion.

But the pundits should know that that is what politics is about these days, and we owe it to Morris, whose book is lively, readable and anecdotally rich, for his insider’s account of the way the game is played. If you are thinking of running for president one day - or even if you just want to know how a successful campaign is run - you may want to read it.

Morris begins his account of the 1996 campaign with a call from the president shortly after the 1994 Democratic midterm election disaster. He had worked for Clinton in Arkansas several times and calls him a highly gifted man imbued with “a genuine passion to improve the lot of Americans,” as well as an explosive temper and a habit of blaming others when things go wrong.

Once Clinton, enraged by discouraging poll results in a gubernatorial race in Arkansas, screamed obscenely at Morris. When Morris began to walk out, Clinton “grabbed me from behind and wrapped his arms around me to stop me from leaving.” Morris says: “I slipped to the floor. Hillary helped me to my feet. The moment I stood up, Clinton became apologetic.”

Morris freely dispenses his views of the 1996 campaign, including the factors that he says enabled Clinton to have one of the more remarkable reversals of fortune in recent American politics. Among those factors, for example, is what Morris calls the president’s “secret weapon” - a saturation television advertising campaign that began running in swing states well before the campaign officially started.

The idea, as Morris explains it, was to establish in the public mind a moderate Democratic alternative to what had become a Republican issue after the conservative sweep in 1994: the call for a balanced budget.

Morris’ “triangulation,” as he awkwardly puts it, was to steal the issue by agreeing with the goal but insisting on a more humane way to reach it, namely retaining the most politically popular social programs. Other advisers, Morris says, argued that a television campaign beginning in mid-1995 would be forgotten by the time the voters went to the polls more than a year later.

“I countered by predicting that if we brought legislative issues into every American’s home through ads, the Republican issues would be dead before the race even started, which is what happened,” Morris writes.

Morris discloses the additional interesting information that the ads did not run in the nation’s media capitals - New York, Los Angeles and Washington - so the extensive campaign unfolded without the national press catching on to it and making it an issue. Clinton, he says, spent $85 million on the ads, more than the Clinton and Bush campaigns combined spent on television advertising in the 1992 campaign.

Morris casts his story of the campaign and the work of a campaign consultant in idealistic terms. He is especially concerned about rejecting what might be called the cynical view of the consultant’s work. “I don’t spin anything,” he writes. “I put new substance and ideas before the voters.”

Morris demonstrates that he does do that sometimes, but the everyday obsessions he describes - with polling, with figuring out what will please the public, with the calculated micromanagement of the president’s image - give a very different impression from the one he seems to want to make. Even so, for all its self-promotion and self-congratulation, Morris’ book remains a rich portrait of the American political vocation as it is conceived and practiced at the highest levels.