Profile of Dick Morris on Famous Like Me

Dick Morris (born November 28, 1948 in New York City) is a political author and commentator who was once a successful pollster and campaign consultant. Morris is best known for managing Bill Clinton's successful 1996 bid for re-election to the office of President of the United States. His tenure on that campaign was cut short two months before the election, when it was revealed that he had had an extramarital affair with a prostitute and allowed her to listen to conversations with the President. Following the scandal, Morris turned his focus to media commentary. He now writes a weekly column for the New York Post and appears regularly on the Fox News Channel. Morris has written several books that criticize the Clintons, including Rewriting History, a rebuttal to Senator Hillary Clinton's Living History.

Early life

Morris attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City, where he was active on the debate team. He managed Jerrold Nadler's campaign for class president; Nadler has since gone on to represent New York in the House of Representatives. Morris graduated from Stuyvesant in 1964, then attended Columbia where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Morris and Clinton

Morris first worked with Bill and Hillary Clinton during Bill Clinton's successful 1978 bid for Governor of Arkansas. Though he did not work on Bill Clinton's unsuccessful re-election campaign in 1980, Morris helped him win back the governor's office in 1982 and continued to work with him in subsequent gubernatorial campaigns. Morris did not have a role in Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign, which instead was headed by James Carville and Paul Begala. After the 1994 mid-term election where Republicans took control of both houses of Congress and gained considerable power in the states, Clinton once again sought Morris' help to prepare for the 1996 presidential election. It was Morris who proposed a strategy of "triangulation," where Bill Clinton would appeal to a diverse group of voters by distancing himself from both the Democratic and Republican parties. Many perceived this as a move to the center of the political spectrum, and it disappointed some people who had hoped Clinton would pursue a more progressive policy.

In his 1997 book Behind the Oval Office, Morris wrote that, following an argument in the Arkansas Governor's Mansion, Morris strode towards the exit and was tackled by Bill Clinton. In 2003, Morris further stated that Bill Clinton cocked his arm back to throw a punch, but Hillary Clinton pulled her husband off Morris. In both versions of the story, she consoled Morris and apologized to him, stating that Bill only behaved such with those he cared for most. According to Morris, she did this to keep him quiet about the incident. He says the incident was the reason for denying Bill Clinton's request to work on the '92 campaign; Clinton's side of the story is not known.

Scandal

On August 29, 1996, Morris resigned from the Clinton campaign after reports surfaced that he had been involved in an extramarital affair with a prostitute named Sherry Rowlands. A tabloid newspaper had obtained a photograph of Morris and Rowlands on a Washington, DC hotel balcony. It was revealed that Morris had allowed Rowlands to listen in on phone calls with the President, and had given her a copy of a campaign speech before it was delivered. He resigned on the same day that Bill Clinton spoke and accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention. In his resignation statement, he said that "while I served I sought to avoid the limelight because I did not want to become the message. Now, I resign so I will not become the issue." In his response, President Clinton praised Morris as a "friend" and thanked him for his years of service.

Morris was featured on two consecutive covers of Time Magazine. The September 2, 1996 issue, which was released before the scandal story broke, featured Morris as "The Man Who Has Clinton's Ear." The following week, the cover featured Morris and his wife, Eileen McGann, and the headline read "The Morris Mess: After the Fall."

It was also revealed that Morris has a child in Texas, whom he fathered out of wedlock.

Other work

Morris makes it known that he is a bipartisan consultant, although he criticized Senator John Kerry's 2004 campaign for U.S. President in his newspaper and online columns. In addition to his work with Bill Clinton, he once worked for senators Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, as well as former governors William Weld of Massachusetts and Pete Wilson of California and current governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. As early as 1988, he has said, he decided to work only for Republicans, a claim reiterated in 1995; his role in Clinton's 1992 campaign and presidency was kept secret from the staff. He is not believed to have worked as a U.S. political strategist since the scandal of 1996, possibly because of candidates' fears that their choice of consultant would cause bad publicity.

Morris says he became profoundly "disillusioned" with the actions of the Clintons in the late 90's, after his resignation. He has now formed a career of sorts as a political commentator and critic of the Clintons, often appearing on talk shows such as Hannity & Colmes and the O'Reilly Factor.

Morris worked with the United Kingdom Independence Party in their campaign before the 2004 European Parliament election. The party, which advocates withdrawal from the European Union, won 12 of Britain's 78 seats.

Morris appeared frequently in the straight-to-DVD documentary FahrenHYPE 9/11, which offers an alternative viewpoint to Michael Moore's 2004 film, Fahrenheit 9/11.

In 2004 and 2005, he and his wife acted as campaign consultants to the successful Yushchenko presidential campaign in Ukraine. Morris insisted on the use of exit polls as a means of potentially exposing ballot tampering. He argues this played a significant role in forcing the incumbent to acquiesce to a new poll when the official results of the first varied materially from the exit surveys.

As political analyst for FoxNews

MORRIS: "Oh, God. I love Karl Rove. He deserves better. He's magnificent. He elected Bush. The country owes him a debt"

Books

Morris has written several books. Most recently he wrote Condi vs. Hillary (subtitled The next great presidential race) (ISBN 0060839139) in which he argues that only Condoleezza Rice could block Hillary Clinton's anticipated 2008 bid for the White House. He co-authored this book with his wife, Eileen McGann.

Previously he wrote a pair of books criticizing the Clintons, again co-authored his wife, Eileen McGann. Rewriting History (ISBN 0060736682) was published in May of 2004 as a rebuttal to Hillary Clinton's book, Living History (ISBN 0743222245). In it, he argues that Hillary Clinton has presented a false "nice" persona in the book. Morris instead remembers her as manipulative, cold, and single-minded in her pursuit of power. Similarly, Morris and McGann wrote Because He Could (ISBN 0060784156) in response to Bill Clinton's memoir My Life (ISBN 0375414576).

Morris has also written Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties (ISBN 1580630537), a retrospective of his work with the Clintons that was published soon after his resignation from the campaign due to scandal. Other books include Power Plays: Win or Lose--How History's Great Political Leaders Play the Game (ISBN 0060004444) and Vote.com: How Big-Money Lobbyists and the Media Are Losing Their Influence, and the Internet Is Giving Power Back to the People (ISBN 1580631630).

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Dick Morris