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Young Morris jumped into politics early, running his first campaign in fourth grade (his candidate won the student-council presidency). In 1960, at 12, he canvassed his apartment building for John Kennedy and gave street-corner speeches extolling the Democrat. The next year, at elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Morris joined the debate club, displaying a talent for arguing any side of any issue ("Truth is that which cannot be proved false," he said) and teaming up with a group of budding pols that included future Congressman Jerrold Nadler and state assemblyman Richard Gottfried. "Dick was always the leader," says Gottfried, "the most creative thinker, the most energetic worker, the one on the phone at 2 in the morning telling you what had to be done. He was already that way at 14."
In 1964 Morris organized his West Side district in support of a local candidate; by sending students to ring every doorbell he tripled the district's Democratic turnout. Graduating from Columbia University in three years, he worked New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign, butting heads over budget and turf with another West Side Democrat, Harold Ickes. Twenty-eight years later they're still at it: Ickes, now Clinton's deputy chief of staff for policy and political affairs, uses his control of the campaign purse strings to torment Morris. Eight years older than Morris, Ickes belonged to the Democratic reformers who had taken power on the West Side in the early 1960s. Morris came at them in 1969 as leader of the "West Side Kids," setting up his own political clubhouses, running a slate of candidates for party district-leader slots and getting all seven elected--which gave him de facto control of a 30-block stretch. He flirted with the idea of running himself, then stashed those ambitions forever. "I preferred to be the cat with nine lives," he says. "If we lost, I was still employed." Says West Side activist Ross Graham: "Some of us wanted to change the world. Dick wanted to run it."
Morris earned serious policy credentials to go with his political smarts. He spent six years as an analyst with a city-budget watchdog group, became issues director for a failed New York gubernatorial candidate (meeting his wife, litigator Eileen McGann, during the campaign), then hung out his shingle as a free-lance issues adviser. "It didn't hurt that candidates thought I could deliver the West Side," he says. He helped a raft of local Democrats hone their positions but found that policy alone didn't fire his engines. "I wanted to find some way to connect issues with electability," he says. He teamed up with pollster Richard Dresner, who Morris says did some work for Hollywood studios, asking audiences which blurb made them want to see the next James Bond movie and which of three alternate endings they preferred. Morris had an idea: "Let's do the same thing for politicians." And then he met Bill Clinton.
A MARRIAGE IN LITTLE ROCK