Had there never been so much as a hint of sordid sex-play involving President Clinton’s now-departed chief strategist, Dick Morris would still be the biggest news from the Chicago Democratic convention. And the story would still be a scandal.
Whenever it is busy stoning to death a political career like Morris’s, American journalism asks itself, as it no doubt should, some Very Difficult Questions. But there is something particularly comical, almost delusional, about the way those questions have so far been answered in the present instance — about the way Morrisgate has been justified as ” legitimate” news. While allegedly consorting with a prostitute, the man has helped the president reposition himself as an advocate of family values. So Dick Morris is a hypocrite. But we knew that already. And we would never much have cared to know the minor official secrets Morris is accused of ” betraying” to the lady. Let’s face it: Had his confidant been Bob Woodward instead of a call girl, Morris would still be on the job.
No, Morris has been run out of town exclusively on grounds of personal tawdriness. He has been measured against standards of private behavior generally applied only to actual public officials and candidates, the people in politics of greatest symbolic and substantive significance. Is Dick Morris really so important? Judging from the Chicago convention, and what it reveals about Bill Clinton’s presidency and the Democratic party as an institution, the answer is yes, he is that important. And that is the scandal. Forget the hooker.
With Dick Morris, the role of the professional strategist in American politics rises to the level of pure caricature. He is the compleat modern mercenary: a “Republican” one week, a “Democrat” the next; a man for whom the stylized warfare of politics, and the manipulation of its vote-grabbing techniques, is everything; a man who not only ignores the elevated aspects of partisanship, but actively disdains them as counterproductive to victory.
And with Chicago ’96 — the worst, most vulgar, most corrosively cynical political convention in American history — a sitting president and his entire Democratic army have thoroughly submitted themselves to Morrisism. They have deliberately forsworn the effort to address the largest questions in American public life. The Democratic party no longer pretends to be a vehicle for the advancement of a serious American political agenda.
For them, the era of robust, meaningful big government does seem genuinely over. It has been replaced by an era of big sentiment, small but endless programmatic busywork, and inarticulate identity politics.
Two of four evenings in Chicago were most notably devoted to brutally direct, argument-killing invocations of personal tragedy. Vice President Gore deoxygenated the United Center for ten agonizing minutes with an emotional and (though you are not allowed to say so) exploitative description of his sister’s cancer death. Two days earlier, paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve and gunshot victim Jim Brady had appeared on stage. They were powerful presences, and the United Center throbbed with empathy for them. But each was designed to disguise the real character of partisanship, not explain it. Reeve whispered that the nation needs “not a Democratic motto, not a Republican motto,” but an “American motto.” Brady’s wife Sarah told us that her wheelchair-bound husband’s misfortune is not “a Democratic or a Republican problem.”
Gore did drip gallons of acid on Senator Dole and Speaker Gingrich, depicting them as cold-hearted nasties you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry. But he never called them “Republicans,” and he rigorously avoided the word “Democrat” from start to finish, too. The vice president referred to his own party only by implication, and only for a moment. Hillary Clinton’s breathtakingly arrogant explanation of how it ” takes Bill Clinton” in the White House “to raise a happy, healthy and hopeful child” in today’s America contained not a single explicitly partisan word. Keynoter Evan Bayh spoke the D-word . . . once. Democratic party co-chairman Christopher Dodd, renominating the president, didn’t use the term “Democrat” at all.
So went the Chicago convention for four nights, up to and including all 66 minutes of the president’s workmanlike but fundamentally anti- political acceptance speech. Americans are now asked to choose Clinton in November as they might choose a pair of designer sneakers. They should be like Bill; they need not think like him or act in support of Democratic ideas.
Those few convention speeches that briefly suggested a flicker of passion for the party and its liberalism already look like exercises in death-haunted, rearguard spin. Jesse Jackson’s argument in behalf of Clinton’s reelection, for example: “Well, what is the alternative?”
No major convention speaker aggressively proposed the restoration of a Democratic congressional majority that might make possible some theoretically ambitious Clintonite politics. ” That’s not the basis of his appeal to the American people,” the president’s press secretary acknowledged the day of his speech. In that speech, Clinton all but wrote off his party’s chance to retake Congress in November. As long as he is president, he promised, “I will never allow the Republican leadership to use the blackmail threat…” And so on. Vice President Gore repeatedly vowed that he and Clinton won’t let “them” succeed. Both men clearly expect “them,” Republicans in a congressional majority, to return in January as convenient foils.
Foils for what? The second term Clinton is now forecasting is poll-driven vote-bait, not a determined bid for history. If he wins, he will devote himself to a series of eensie-weensie tax credits and a mind-numbingly long list of on-the-cheap federal solutions to problems most Americans probably aren’t aware they even have. He will march in place against the Republican party. The country will move a few inches here or there for four long years.
And the Democrats, they told us with unusual unanimity in Chicago, will be satisfied with that. The world’s oldest political party is a disgraceful husk of its former self. On purpose. Dick Morris has been whisked from view. But he is still there, dominating everything, in mind and spirit. There is nothing else.
David Tell, for the Editors
