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February 2, 1997
As Seen on TV By JAMES B. STEWART
Dick Morris explains how he created 'the first fully advertised Presidency.
Behind the Oval Office
Winning the Presidency in the Nineties.
By Dick Morris.
359 pp. New York:
Random House. $25.95.
''BEHIND THE OVAL OFFICE'' tells several stories. The rise of Dick Morris from New York City pol to sophisticated pollster to Presidential adviser to disgraced john is one. The behind-the-scenes story of the making of policy in the White House is another. President Clinton's transformation from unpopular captive of liberals to victorious New Democrat is a third. But its most persuasive story seems almost inadvertent: the extraordinary dominance of television, and the money to pay for it, in Presidential politics.Thus, in Mr. Morris's view, the ''key to Clinton's victory'' wasn't the President's track record, wasn't the economy, wasn't the Republican-led Government shutdown, wasn't Bob Dole's age. It was Mr. Clinton's ''early television advertising. There has never been anything even remotely like it in the history of Presidential elections,'' Mr. Morris writes. Spending a staggering $85 million, he exults, ''We created the first fully advertised Presidency in U.S. history.'' No wonder Mr. Clinton had to consort with wealthy foreigners.
The television ad campaign had to ''begin early, be continual, stress the same themes week after week, and above all, not be jammed or countered by the press.'' While the campaign blitzed most Americans with three ads a week, it deliberately avoided New York, Washington and Los Angeles, because of these cities' concentrations of national news media. Mr. Morris is positively gleeful that he succeeded so well -- ''a brutal comment on the free media's limitations.'' He is less forthcoming about why it was so important that the ''free'' (as opposed to ''paid'') media be kept in the dark. Perhaps he feared scrutiny of the accuracy of these ads (a subject he discusses only glancingly), or media claims that voters were being manipulated. But surely none of that would have stopped the juggernaut he describes.
Mr. Morris, as befits a pollster, seems to have the numbers to back up his assertion that television turned the Clinton Presidency around. He notes that during all of 1996, a time when the President's poll-inspired agenda and re-crafted image were being relentlessly driven home through television advertising, his popularity remained constant. ''Through Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Hillary's supposed seances, three terrorist bombings, reversals in the Middle East, the Republican primaries, the Republican Convention -- through all the ups and downs of Clinton's Presidency in 1996, the numbers remained basically the same.''
Given television's importance, it's hardly surprising that the science of Q ratings, the instant polling long used by the networks to determine everything from a star's hairdo to plot twists, has been carried to its logical absurdity. Mr. Morris insisted that Mr. Clinton take a hiking vacation, even though the prospect bored the President, because polls show swing voters like hiking and the outdoors. When polls demonstrated that voters opposed teen-age smoking, Mr. Morris pressed Mr. Clinton to go on the offensive against the tobacco industry, even though the President worried about the repercussions in states like North Carolina and Kentucky. These are just two of what seem innumerable examples, the most revealing of which may be the account of Mr. Clinton's sweeping ''values'' agenda, the philosophical underpinnings of the second half of his first term.
Like so much else in the Clinton Presidency, this agenda began with a poll. (Mr. Morris reports that the President doesn't have time to read newspapers, but would ''start his day with a summary of the latest polling information.'') On one occasion, Mr. Morris's pollsters asked five ''so-called values questions'':
1. Do you believe that sex before marriage is wrong?
2. Do you believe that homosexuality is morally wrong?
3. Is religion very important in your life?
4. Do you personally ever look at pornography?
5. Do you look down on people who have affairs outside of their marriage?
Mr. Morris doesn't say who may have been present when these questions were answered -- spouses and children, for example -- but given their wording, it's hardly surprising that the answers suggested that ''a third of the country was socially conservative'' and ''another third answered conservatively to three of the five.'' Mr. Morris's conclusion: ''We had to get the values voters back.''
In short order, the values agenda emerged as public policy. Mr. Clinton ordered his Secretary of Education to promote ''religious observance and moral values on public-school grounds.'' He called for the wearing of school uniforms and denounced violence on television. He immediately embraced and then signed the Republican-inspired Defense of Marriage Act, permitting states to outlaw same-sex marriages. ''Over the months, the focus of the Administration shifted more and more to values,'' Mr. Morris concludes with evident satisfaction.
All of this is narrated without the slightest hint of irony, even though Mr. Morris was seeing a prostitute at that very time. How would Mr. Morris himself have answered the ''values questions'' his pollsters put such store in? For that matter, how would Mr. Clinton? After the tabloid Star revealed Mr. Morris's affair just as the Democratic Convention was getting under way, he saw no reason to resign from the Clinton campaign. Mr. Morris tells us that Erskine Bowles, then deputy chief of staff, visited him in his Chicago hotel room to discuss his resignation.
''I was shocked, hurt and devastated'' at the suggestion he resign, Mr. Morris writes. ''I recognized the seriousness of the situation, but still hoped that somehow I could stay. 'Why?' I asked. 'What the hell did I do that he wasn't accused of doing in the exact same magazine four years ago?'
'' 'You've admitted it's true,' Bowles replied.'' In the Clinton inner sanctum, truth is evidently the one unforgivable sin.
Hypocrisy aside, the entire values agenda and all the polling to support it would have been wastes of time and money unless they could be exploited on television, which is where the $85 million came in. ''We formulated each ad according to our polling,'' Mr. Morris reports. The ads themselves, before being broadcast, were tested with shoppers in malls to assess their impact. At first, poll questions were cleared with President Clinton. But as time passed, Mr. Morris reports, ''he let us proceed on our own.'' Thus the initiation of the entire chain of polling/ policy/television advertising seems largely to have passed out of the President's hands -- and Mr. Morris acknowledges that questions can be worded to produce almost any desired result. Is it any wonder that in Mr. Clinton we have a President who seems more interested in polling and advertising than he does in governing? Or that the likes of Dick Morris would have ended up as Clinton's closest adviser? (''I don't think any President has ever had someone as close as you are to me,'' Mr. Clinton tells him.)
That I find all of this profoundly depressing is no criticism of Mr. Morris's book, which, as best I can tell, delivers on his promise to write ''simply the truth about my role in a series of extraordinary events.'' As the first of the Clinton White House insiders to publish his memoirs, Mr. Morris reveals much new detail, if no shocking disclosures. The portraits of Bill and Hillary Clinton are hardly uniformly flattering, with the President's childish temper and Mrs. Clinton's cold vengefulness amply on display (though it was Mrs. Clinton who was most compassionate about Dick Morris's demise). The portrait of Mr. Morris's rival and the President's former deputy chief of staff, Harold Ickes, is scathing, and George Stephanopoulos fares only slightly better. One can only sympathize with Mr. Clinton as he presides over what seems like endless backstabbing and squabbling by his White House staff.
And Mr. Morris succeeds in demonstrating his own real contributions, as he moves steadily from pollster to adviser. He percolates with ideas, all of which seem well intentioned if occasionally unsound, an amazing number of which were embraced by Mr. Clinton. As the President said on ''The Newshour With Jim Lehrer'' after Mr. Morris's resignation, ''What I miss the most is his creativity, his ideas, his energy -- he would come up with lots of ideas. I'd go through them and pick the ones I wanted and discard the others, but I miss his ideas.''
''Behind the Oval Office'' suffers badly, if understandably, from Morriscentrism. We never hear anyone else's version of events, especially Mr. Clinton's. Mr. Morris's emphasis on polling and its implementation in policy and on television may ultimately demean both Mr. Clinton and the Presidency. But Mr. Morris, humbled by his recent public downfall, does not seem boastful. He has written an account that future historians of the Clinton Presidency will not be able to ignore.
Toward the end of his tenure, Mr. Morris invites Mr. Clinton to discuss with him the President's place in history, suggesting somewhat bluntly that he places Mr. Clinton only in the ''third tier'' of Presidents, and a borderline third tier at that. First tier, he suggests, a ranking he accords Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R., may be unattainable, requiring as it does crises of historic significance. Second tier -- where Mr. Morris places Jackson, Polk and Ronald Reagan -- may be possible, but in what seems an extraordinary concession for a professional pollster, Mr. Morris opines that ''popularity doesn't get you on the list.'' Neither, he notes, does a strong economy, a nation at peace or a lower crime rate. What does? Great deeds: ''Big things.''
Mr. Morris doesn't say so, but the great deeds of our history -- Lincoln's freeing the slaves, Johnson's civil rights legislation, even Reagan's defense buildup to hasten the end of the cold war -- required strong leadership and a sense of underlying justice in the face of intense opposition, in many cases from members of both parties. These Presidents ''triangulated,'' to use Mr. Morris's favorite phrase, not by moving to the center but by moving away from it, even at the risk of great unpopularity. Without benefit of hindsight, these steps took personal conviction and courage -- a quality Mr. Morris hardly mentions.
By such a standard, welfare reform, balancing the budget and preserving affirmative action, however laudable or politically astute, will not meet the test. Securing civil rights for gay people, including allowing them to serve openly in the military, might. So might overhauling immigration standards and protecting and encouraging those who immigrate. Or, maybe, to mention the politically untouchable, improving the nation's health care and extending its availability.
President Clinton can no longer be re-elected. Perhaps Dick Morris and all he represents have served their purpose.
James B. Stewart is the author, most recently, of ''Blood Sport.''
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