Dick Morris' ridiculous memoirs.

By Jacob Weisberg

On the last day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I woke to the news that presidential adviser Dick Morris was about to resign over reports that he had been consorting with a $200-an-hour prostitute. I was, of course, amazed. But then I thought: "Why should anyone be surprised? Morris is a $200-an-hour prostitute." Things have changed since then. Morris has raised his prices.

Now a normal person would be offended by what I've just written. In Morris' case, though, I'm afraid he may use it as a blurb for the paperback edition of his book, Behind the Oval Office. The current version includes this blurb from a brutal demolition job in Vanity Fair: "He never stops. Somehow, each shocking thing he does tops the shocking thing he did last year, or last month, or even last week." Morris' career has developed the curious quality of a plea bargain in reverse. If you say he's guilty of a misdemeanor, he will try to persuade you he's actually committed a felony.

In reality, he's not fit to stand trial. Morris discusses right and wrong as if those concepts were as remote from his own experience as lunar geology. "I wanted to address the values agenda three or four times a week," he writes at one point in the book. "First, though, we had to identify through polls which values were important to Americans." Blind people often have highly developed powers of hearing and smell, but in Morris' case, he does not seem to have compensated for an attenuated moral sense with any other heightened abilities--not intelligence, not political savvy, and certainly not literary acumen. Despite being rotten to the core, Dick Morris demonstrates in his book that he has nothing else to offer.

Morris casts himself, of course, as the man who brought Bill Clinton back from calamity and got him re-elected in 1996. Most of the press fell for this hype during the campaign. But Morris' own account undermines the myth. By claiming credit for absolutely everything, Morris leaves you wondering whether he deserves credit for anything at all. To call his recollections "unreliable" would be a massive understatement. There is hardly anything he says in the book that he does not contradict at some other point in the book. Usually, the mutually contradictory statements fall within a few pages of each other. Here are just a few subjects where Morris leaves the reader absolutely mystified about his views and his role:

Negative advertising: On page 60, Morris swears off it. "As Eileen [Morris' wife, who is now divorcing him] and my therapist, Dr. Elizabeth Hauser, softened my rage and brought me inner peace for the first time in my life, I decided to abandon negative advertising as a métier." On page 63, Morris boasts about an ad he had produced for Clinton, attacking an opponent, in the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial primary: "Don't let McRae build a wall around Arkansas." Five pages after that, Morris brags about his script for an ad in the general election of that year. It culminated in this assertion: "You can't trust Sheffield Nelson."

Foreign intervention: "Noninvolvement in Bosnia had been a central element in my advice," he writes on page 253. But just a few pages earlier, Morris was taking credit for Clinton's brave decision to send troops to Bosnia. And a few pages later, he's telling the president to bomb the Serbs back to the Stone Age. "I don't mean the current stuff ... where NATO sends in only a few planes," he counsels. "I mean an air strike that continues until they give up."

Press leaks: "Throughout my tenure at the White House, I never leaked information unless I was told to," Morris writes on page 171. On the same page: "I called David Broder of the Washington Post to give him background on the strategic implications of the speech and he ran a story." The call wasn't authorized--in fact, Morris got in trouble for it, he says.

Budget cuts: On page 93, Morris advises Clinton: "Medicare cuts are your single biggest weapon against the Republicans. They are hated by the public, old and young." Three pages later, he writes: "I argued that as long as we lined up with the congressional Democrats and just sniped at cuts in school lunches and Medicare, we would get nowhere."

This last contradiction is central, because it goes to the heart of Morris' claim to have got Clinton re-elected. The conventional understanding at the time was that it was Morris' liberal enemies--George Stephanopoulos, Harold Ickes, and Leon Panetta--who were arguing in favor of fiercely resisting Republican cuts in social spending, while Morris was telling Clinton to distance himself from the intransigent congressional Democrats. According to my sources at the time, Morris was desperately pushing for a budget deal and making the kind of hilariously precise electoral promises for which he was legendary: If he compromised with Gingrich, Clinton would win by a 14-point margin, take back Congress, and so forth.