Dick Morris' brain was in orbit. It was late July, and the President's political consultant--the co-author of his campaign message and advertising, the strategist who helped Clinton scoop up Republican issues and ideas on his way to a double-digit lead over Bob Dole--was returning again and again to a problem he thought might hurt Clinton's re-election. Not welfare reform, because Morris had already won that fight, but taxes. Clinton had promised a middle-class tax cut in 1992 but delivered a tax increase on the wealthy instead. Now Dole was getting ready to hammer Clinton with his own 15% solution.
"We must have our own proposal," Morris argued during a strategy session in the White House residence. Sitting in his usual pose--head cocked to one side, hands shaping the air in front of him, small frame pumped with manic energy--Morris urged Clinton to propose a capital-gains cut on Aug. 1, a few days before Dole was to release his plan. Clinton could say the cut would "pay for itself," Morris enthused, by stimulating investment and boosting tax revenue. But it was a brazen idea, an affront to the Administration's posture of fiscal rectitude. In fact, the White House was planning to ridicule Dole for using gimmicks to pay for his plan; Clinton would lose credibility if he went in for smoke and mirrors of his own. Even more awkward, Aug. 1 turned out to be the day after Clinton told the nation he was signing the welfare-reform bill. To Democratic loyalists, Morris' idea meant that the President would cast a million children into poverty one day and give a tax cut to the rich the next.
"If we do this, Dick," Clinton said, "people will think it's precisely what it is," a naked appeal to swing voters.
"Wouldn't matter," said Morris. "We need to get well on taxes."
"I'm not gonna do it," Clinton drawled.
"O.K.," said Morris. He saw it was time to move on.
Ever since Clinton reached for him two years ago in late-night phone calls to help steer his political comeback, the former Republican strategist has become famous for casting a mighty and mysterious spell on the presidency. But the true magic of Morris isn't so much making Clinton understand that the American majority dances to a Republican tune, or extracting great ideas from Mark Penn's and Doug Schoen's zeitgeist-tracking polls, or rummaging through the bureaucracy looking for programs that help the President appear relevant. Morris' gift is to be a psychological trip wire for Clinton, pushing ideological gambits so far across the spectrum that Clinton can just say no. When the consultant wanted Clinton to roll back racial preferences, impose constitutionally dubious restrictions on civilian militias and launch federal roundups of illegal aliens, Clinton vetoed the ideas each time. In that sense, the lesson of the Morris years may be that it takes an adviser with no core ideology to make Bill Clinton search for his own.
For Morris is a gleeful genius who preaches what he's paid to preach, who can teach it round or teach it flat. He is someone lost so far inside the game that he breaks its most basic rules--Don't leak to the other side, Don't sell out your clients--and doesn't seem to notice. "Dick has a blind spot on character," says a key Clinton aide. "The President sees that, and it makes him think about his own blind spots. That's a real service."