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The marriage lasted until 1990, when Morris and Clinton had a blowup during Clinton's last gubernatorial campaign. A friend of Morris' remembers the morning Morris called and told him about the fight he'd had with Clinton the night before. Morris and Clinton had been up late arguing about the race against challenger Sheffield Nelson, who was pulling near with just weeks to go. Clinton complained that Morris was spending all his time with G.O.P. clients while Clinton skidded toward defeat. "Clinton, all I get is grief from my Republicans for doing you," Morris replied. "I'm leaving--and I'm going to work for Nelson." Morris told the friend he had slammed his briefcase shut and started out the door when Clinton came up and tackled him. A security guard separated them. Morris went back to his hotel, and Hillary called him at dawn: "You've got to come back. He only does this to those he loves."
Clinton recently told an interviewer that he'd merely "grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around" during the incident. At the time, Clinton gave another version to former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer. "Bill told me he slapped Dick," says Roemer. And Morris says the whole thing never happened.
THE PROBLEM WITH POLLS
Like Clinton, many of Morris' early clients were attorneys general, and he ran them as crusading "people's lawyers" in populist campaigns attacking rapacious utility companies and other targets. A rare pollster who can really write, he championed staccato, issues-based TV-ad campaigns that cloaked the negatives in a neutral, newsy style. "I didn't sell candidates through images," he says. "My motto was biblical: 'By their acts shall ye know them.'"
Sometimes the Morris approach backfired. When Clinton decided to become the "education Governor" in 1983, raising taxes to improve Arkansas schools and taking on the education lobby with his call for teacher recertification, voters loved it. A year later, another Morris client, Governor Mark White of Texas, tried the same thing, but got booted out of office because of it. "Teachers make up about 7% of the vote in Arkansas," says Morris sheepishly, "and 17% of the vote in Texas. I didn't know that. I didn't think to ask."
White respects Morris but is sore about his polls. White has told friends, "That boy came down here and said he had a poll that proves 70% of Texans are in favor of something. So we did it. Then he came down again and said 70% favored this thing over here. So we did that too. Another poll, another 70%, so we did it. By then I had 90% of the state pissed off at me."
For years Morris was dogged by rumors that he made up his poll numbers and skewed his samples to support his own strategic arguments. "We got to the point where we didn't really believe his polls," says Roemer, who hired Morris during his upset 1987 victory over Edwin Edwards for Louisiana Governor. "We used another pollster. With Dick, numbers were never the point. Ideas were." Though Morris denies cooking his figures, he too may have realized that poll taking wasn't his strength. He became a general strategist and let professionals like Penn and Schoen do the polling.
CHAOS THEORY