Dick Morris
Richard Samuel Morris is an American author, commentator, and former political consultant.
A friend and advisor to Bill Clinton during his time as Governor of Arkansas and since his 1978 run, Morris became a political adviser to the White House after Clinton was elected president in 1992. Morris encouraged Clinton to pursue Third Way policies of triangulation that combined traditional Republican and Democratic proposals, rhetoric, and issues so as to achieve maximum political gain and popularity. He worked as a Republican strategist before joining the Clinton administration, where he helped Clinton recover from the Republican Revolution by advising him to adopt more moderate policies. The president consulted Morris in secret beginning in 1994. Clinton's communications director George Stephanopoulos has said, "Over the course of the first nine months of 1995, no single person had more power over the president." Morris went on to become campaign manager of Clinton's successful 1996 bid for re-election as president, but his tenure on that political campaign was cut short two months before the election, when it was revealed that he had not only solicited a prostitute but also allowed her to listen in on conversations with the President.
, Morris wrote a weekly column for the New York Post that is carried nationwide, and contributes columns and blogs to both the print and online versions of The Hill. He is also president of Vote.com. By 2005, Morris had emerged as a harsh critic of the Clintons and wrote several books that criticize them, including Rewriting History, a rebuttal to then-U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton's Living History.
Morris was the strategist for Republican Christy Mihos's campaign in the 2010 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, and supported Mitt Romney in 2012. He has appeared in the past on Fox News for political commentary, especially appearing on The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity. After the 2012 presidential election, Morris did not appear on Fox News for three months, and the network ultimately opted not to renew his contract.
Early life
Morris was born in 1948 in New York City, New York, the son of writer Terry Lesser Morris, an early proponent of confessional human interest stories, and attorney Eugene J. Morris. He 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. Morris was also involved in the first campaign of Richard Gottfried for New York State Assembly in 1970. Morris graduated from Stuyvesant in 1964, then attended Columbia University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating in 1967. At Columbia, he roomed with Nadler.Morris and the Clintons
Morris first worked with Bill and Hillary Clinton during Bill Clinton's successful 1978 bid for Governor of Arkansas. Morris did not have a role in Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign, which instead was headed by David Wilhelm, James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, and Paul Begala. After the 1994 midterm elections, in which Republicans took control of both houses of the United States Congress and gained considerable power in the states, Clinton once again sought Morris' help to prepare for the 1996 presidential election.In his writings, Morris "recounts the First Lady’s numerous kindnesses to his aging parents."
Sex worker scandal
On August 29, 1996, Morris resigned from the Clinton campaign after tabloid reports stated that he had been involved with a prostitute, Sherry Rowlands, as reported by The Washington Post. A New York tabloid newspaper, Star, had obtained and published a set of photographs allegedly of Morris and the woman on a Washington, D.C., hotel balcony. News of the impending publication broke during the third day of the 1996 Democratic Convention. The Electronic Telegraph reported unverified claims that in order to impress Rowlands, Morris invited her to listen in on his conversations with President Clinton. It was reported that Rowlands worked for $200 an hour and that after he solicited her for sex, Morris gave Rowlands access to President Clinton's campaign speeches before they were delivered and also let her hear the President's voice during a telephone conservation. According to Rowlands, Morris had a fondness for sucking toes. It was also alleged he had an out-of-wedlock child from an affair with a Texas woman.Morris 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 publicly thanked him for his years of service. Privately, several of Clinton's aides were furious that in his resignation statement Morris credited himself with helping the President "come back from being buried in a landslide" and that Morris ended by comparing himself to Robert F. Kennedy.
Morris was featured on two consecutive covers of Time magazine. The September 2, 1996 issue, which was released before the prostitute 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". Montgomery Blair Sibley wrote a book Why Just Her in defence of the "Washington Madam", Debra Jeane Palfrey. In it, he wrote that Morris was a client of Palfrey's escort agency, and the first individual he planned to call in Palfrey's defence.
Later work
In his 1997 book, Behind the Oval Office, Morris wrote that, following an argument in the Arkansas Governor's Mansion in May 1990, he strode toward the exit and was tackled by Clinton. In 2003, Morris further stated that 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 behaved as such only 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 1992 campaign.Morris has become a vocal and regular critic of the Clintons since his departure, in particular Hillary Rodham Clinton and her bid for the presidency. Morris has written extensively about the Clintons and also contributed to Hillary: The Movie, a documentary about Rodham Clinton when she was still a 2008 presidential candidate. Later, after Bill Clinton's comments about the similarities between Barack Obama's popularity and that of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson in 1988, Morris put out an article on his blog that asserted that this was Clinton's way of injecting race into the political campaign.
Political consulting
, Morris lends his name and assistance to the League of American Voters, an advocacy group for seniors to defeat the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He has been described as "America's most ruthless political consultant" in the BBC documentary Century of the Self, which chronicled how he brought lifestyle marketing to politics for the first time.Morris has consulted for candidates in other countries of the western hemisphere, including the campaigns of Fernando de la Rua for President of Argentina, Jorge Batlle for President of Uruguay, Vicente Fox for President of Mexico, and Raphael Trotman for President of Guyana. Morris and his wife, Eileen McGann, are behind www.vote.com, a site intended to register non-scientific political public opinion on various issues.
Morris worked as a strategist for Christy Mihos, who sought the Republican nomination to run for Governor of Massachusetts in 2010 against incumbent Deval Patrick overseeing strategy, polling, and advertising. At the Republican state convention, Mihos lost to Charlie Baker by 89 percent to 11 percent; by failing to reach 15 percent, Mihos did not qualify for a primary against Baker.
Guest commentator and political prognosticator
Since leaving Clinton's employ in 1996, Morris has said he has become profoundly "disillusioned" with the actions of the Clintons in the late 1990s. He has since formed a career as a political commentator and critic of the Clintons, appearing on Fox News programs such as Hannity & Colmes, Hannity, and The O'Reilly Factor, and on various local and nationally syndicated radio talk shows. Morris is also a regular columnist and Pundits Blogger for The Hill, a nonpartisan daily newspaper based in Washington, D.C., and for Newsmax, a conservative online news website. Morris regularly makes predictions about candidates' chances of winning elections during these appearances.Regarding the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, he initially stated that Howard Dean's candidacy could be written off right away. He had earlier discussed the likelihood of Dean defeating John Kerry after early strong showings by the former Vermont governor. Kerry defeated Dean and all his other rivals and won the nomination.
In a column in The Hill on June 22, 2005, Morris predicted that Hillary Clinton would face her "worst nightmare" in her 2006 Senate race against Republican candidate Judge Jeanine Pirro, whose campaign subsequently collapsed within a matter of two months after repeated crushing defeats in the opinion polls due to her husband's alleged Mafia ties. He even went so far as to suggest that Hillary Clinton would drop out to focus on her 2008 presidential campaign.
In 2005 Morris wrote that Hurricane Katrina "has the capacity to shape the second Bush term in the same way September 11 shaped his first term—not only in rebuilding New Orleans but in taking preventative steps around the nation to bolster our defenses against natural and man-made disasters and terror strikes. Responding to disasters is a source of presidential strength and popularity, and Bush is about to show how it is done."
In August 2011, Morris began a petition on his website opposing federal funding for the Park51 Muslim community center, claiming that the center is "designed to celebrate the attacks that killed 3,000 Americans", and that the center would "train the same kinds of terrorists who caused the... attacks".