I begin to understand why Bill Clinton loved him. Dick Morris–still maneuvering the broad intersection of power and opinion, media and money–is quick 
and cool with sticky soundbites. He’s a man of the next not the last campaign (likely in Morris’ business to be in Brazil, or Japan or Russia). He’s unsentimental about the interests and a lot of the people he’s served, including himself. In conversation he got right to the point about the end of the Media Age (Lyndon Johnson and later Richard Nixon bombing the grassrootsy politics of Barry Goldwater and George McGovern with TV spots) and the start of the Internet Era. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the power-to-the-the-people moments, both right and left, “lasted like the Prague summer,” Morris chuckled. But now people power is back.
“From 1972 to 1999 or 2000 we had what I see as the Media Age in American politics–which empowered guys like me who do television commercials, fundraisers, fat-cat donors, special interests and a handful of people who became the new political elite. But starting, I think, with Clinton beating impeachment in ’99, and going through the Dean campaign of 2004… the media is losing its power in politics and the Internet is gaining it.”
And still, apparently sophisticated people say “what’s a blog?” and give Dick Morris the same blank stare they give you and me at the mention of this mysterious Internet transformation. I wanted to hear what he tells the innocents and the doubters. “Well,” Morris said, “how do you think Bill Clinton survived impeachment but for blogs and MoveOn and all of that? Where did the anti-globalization movement gets its strength from? Certainly not the mainstream media! Where did the right wing get its strength from? And the anti-Clinton stuff? Where is the Dean candidacy from?
“If you just read the New York Times and Washington Post you get blindsided by all this stuff. It’s the new age in which everybody is a publisher of a newspaper and they can circulate it to anyone who’s interested in reading it. And that period of freedom–that free exchange of ideas, unmediated by who has a station license or can afford paper and ink–really I think is just the essence of the Internet era.”
We’re living in Internet time, kids, and we’re not going back. We got here, in Morris’s quick summary, by push and pull. The push is the shriveling audience for network news. Lyndon Johnson used his famous three-set console to keep an eye on ABC, CBS and NBC and see what 70 percent of the country was watching with him. The nightly news exposure gets 18 percent of the electorate these days. And though some pols will triple their TV buys to make up the difference, “it’s the last gasp of a dying system.” The pull, Morris says, is the fact that one quarter of the country is on a computer during prime time; 70 percent of Americans have regular Internet access. “It’s an entirely new age in American politics.”
Dick Morris actually trumps Joe Trippi with Internet bullishness. “The essence of the Internet,” he said, “is not that it provides a new set of eyes and ears, but that it gives the voters a mouth, which they’ve never had in the media. The impact of that is absolutely historic.”
But Morris makes it a mighty Republican tool in 2004, especially in the hands of Karl Rove, a direct-mail master. With email, Rove simply saves the postage. “Let’s remember,” Morris observed, “that the Internet is more male than female, more right-wing than left-wing, more upscale than downscale.” The vast right-wing conspiracy which grew up outside the mainstream media is savvy now about spontaneous on-line community building. Not all the grassroots on the right are Astroturf. “The Republican base is seething with activity,” Morris said. “Also, c’mon, you can’t think of any community that is better connected, and better wired to itself, than the religious community. There are all kinds of prayer groups around the country, and the fact is that people who attend church regularly vote Republican by 2 to 1, and those who don’t vote Democratic by 2 to 1. The gay marriage issue is going to accentuate that divide. So I think this kind of viral bottom-up growth (which is what the Internet is all about) will be as much Republican as Democratic.”
RSVP was the label the old Boston pols used to put on guys like Dick Morris, meaning: ” Rattle Snake. Very Poisonous.” But he’s our kind of rattlesnake. Hear him out here.
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