After the fall, Dick Morris looks to the future

The former presidential advisor discussed Clinton and the media at the Annenberg School yesterday. Slightly more than a year ago, presidential advisor Dick Morris was on top of the world, justly taking credit for designing President Clinton's re-election strategy of adopting traditionally Republican issues as his own. But at the very height of his success, a sex scandal brought Morris' world crashing down, and a man who had spent his entire professional life helping politicians navigate their way through personal crises was forced to find a way to steer through his own. The experience taught him the difference between having "to sail versus how to do white water rafting," he said yesterday in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian. He was on campus to speak at the Annenberg School for Communication. "When it's your own scandal, you just hope to hold onto the raft and not get killed," he said. A lot has changed in the year since Morris resigned from the Clinton campaign in disgrace, after his involvement with $200-an-hour prostitute Sherry Rowlands hit the papers and he fired a last, angry shot at the media. "I will not subject my wife, family and friends to the sadistic vitriol of yellow journalism," he wrote in his resignation letter to Clinton. "I never will." Morris' marriage to Washington, D.C. attorney Eileen McGann survived the scandal, and although he has not returned to the high-stakes world of political consulting, Morris has begun rehabilitating his image through a series of academic appearances such as yesterday's talk to Annenberg Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson's "Political Communication" class. Morris -- who continues to advise Clinton on an informal, unpublicized basis -- insists that the ordeal taught him an important life lesson. "You can't come back from scandal simply by spin -- you have to change," he said. "I feel that I have, significantly." But while Morris insists he has mellowed from his early days as a shadowy political operative -- noting that his life is now a "spiritual, rather than a political, project" -- he remains combative and blunt when discussing politics. He dismisses criticism that his strategy of co-opting moderate Republican issues like welfare reform crippled the intellectual foundations of the Democratic Party, for example, by blasting the party as "old Stalinists." Nor he does mince words when discussing Clinton, with whom he has had a close personal and professional relationship for more than 20 years. "Clinton doesn't have light of his own, but when you have light he absorbs it and reflects back this radiating and warming energy," he said. "[A]lone in a dark room, he's a cold lump of metal that can't get his emotions on track." Morris' bluntness and self-professed desire to "'triangulate' a new consensus incorporating the wisdom of both the right and left" has won him many enemies, with many Democrats criticizing him for having worked for conservative Republicans such as Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). Indeed, his battles with liberal White House insiders such as former Clinton aides George Stephanopolous and Harold Ickes have become the stuff of Washington legend, and there is no love lost between Morris and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who responded to the consultant's resignation by observing that "I knew his politics were amoral. I did not know that he was this immoral." And while the scandal made Morris a pariah among most mainstream Democratic and Republican candidates, he said that he has "already turned down several offers to work on domestic campaigns" in favor of working in foreign politics -- a decision he insists is unconnected to his fall. "I realized a long time ago that I was tired of domestic politics after spending 25 years in the field," he said. "It wasn't, on balance, a positive experience." Looking to the future, Morris said the country is ready for its first female president. "[Elizabeth Dole] might be the only Republican who can win if [Ret. Gen. Colin] Powell doesn't run," he said. It will be a campaign, though, that Morris said he will sit out. "I would hope my life is full enough with other things that I won't miss politics in 2000," he said. And in what may be the clearest indication that the scandal taught him the value of keeping things close to the vest, Morris politely refused to identify what those "other things" were. "I don't talk about that kind of stuff," he said. "It's private."