Re-Release Of Book Little Too Much Dick Morris

“Behind the Oval Office: Getting Re-elected Against All Odds” (Renaissance Books, 392 pages, $16.95 paper, ISBN 1-58063-0-537) by Dick Morris.

Dick Morris has so redefined the role of political hired gun that his picture may someday be featured in Webster’s Dictionary under the definition of the word “mercenary.”

But even for Morris, the re-release of his 1997 book on how he helped win the 1996 election for Bill Clinton - complete with a new introduction and an extra 280 pages of reprinted campaign memos - represents an amazing play for cash.

But let’s be realistic: Somebody’s going to make money off the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, so why not Morris? He’s been making money off candidates of both parties for years.

He worked for Clinton. He worked for George Bush, for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, for Sen. Jesse Helms. Without his considerable effort and expertise, the American political landscape could be much different. Thanks Dick.

But if moneymaking is to be done, it is best done quickly. So before Monica’s publishers can get her lurid recollections down in coherent fashion, before Ken Starr can emulate advisor Sam Dash and a dozen Watergate figures, before Clinton gets convicted or finishes his term and writes his memoirs, there’s this tiny window of opportunity for someone - anyone - who can get out a book connected to impeachment.

Through the window comes Morris and Renaissance Books, sandwiching his 1997 account of the campaign between a 19-page treatise on his perceptions of Clinton’s dual personality and a stack of memos.

In his new introduction, Morris dubs the good leader personality the “Sunday morning president,” and the bad-boy personality “Saturday-night Bill.”

Of course, it might give some readers pause to read one philanderer criticizing another. Morris, after all, is the person who got fired at the height of the ‘96 campaign after being caught sharing campaign secrets with a $200-per-night prostitute. “It takes one to know one” is not the basis of sound psychoanalysis.

The real problem with the introduction is it beats the theory to death. Morris may be a political svengali, but he’s not much of a writer. He piles on his adjectives and strings out the analogies to “the dark side” too much.

The memos may be valuable to historians and interesting to the most addicted of political junkies. But to anyone else, they’re just someone else’s memos. Yawn.

It also seems strange that Morris, who has known and worked with Clinton since he first ran for governor of Arkansas, couldn’t have worked his dual personality analysis in his first edition of the book. If Morris is to be believed, he saw these problems back before anyone had heard of Lewinsky. Why wait?

The original book, even without the new intro and the memos, is an interesting if somewhat self-indulgent look at the inner workings of a presidential campaign. Morris’ help sometimes is portrayed as so crucial that one wonders how Clinton managed to get re-elected after the master advisor was sacked. Momentum, probably.

For most readers, that will be enough Morris. If you want the meat, find an old copy of the book and skip the bread and condiments in this new edition.