DOES THE MORRIS THING MATTER?

By LANCE MORROW

The right brain spins the story this way: it is poetic justice. A highly paid political prostitute, Dick Morris, comes to grief in the arms of an expensive hooker in Washington--a perfect moral fit. The case almost accidentally opens a door upon a disturbing side of American politics--not Dick Morris' character (who cares?) so much as the larger drama of American political manipulation in 1996, and a general atmosphere of sleaze that even the canned floral scents of "family values" cannot perfume.

The left brain responds with counterspin: both personal charity and political experience argue for rolling the eyes, shaking the head and dismissing the Dick Morris scandal. Let the dog that barks at midnight go back to Connecticut and get smacked on the nose with a newspaper by his wife. This is the oldest story: sex and politics, powerful men doing stupid, squalid things. No harm done, except to Morris and family. Morris' wife said in an interview with TIME, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Of course most of us do not manage to sin as colorfully as Dick Morris apparently did.

My own right brain is winning the argument. But maybe the real importance of the Morris scandal is that it crystallizes a struggle that has been going on for years in the American cultural-political conscience. The dispute occurs at the point where the mess of personal character and ambition and expedient need runs into history, principle or public ridicule. Dick Morris' adventures at the Jefferson Hotel--though meaningless in themselves, and pretty funny, if you are feeling savage--are damaging because they connect in the American mind to larger questions of public trust. Doing so, they ensure that the manipulative cynicism of politicians has produced an ultimately more dangerous cynicism in the public.

Sleaze is only sometimes sexual--or financial; in politics, there is a more important corruption, which spreads like a mold. Among other things, this fungus causes the agile politician to dance around repudiating things that he held sacred day before yesterday.

This has been a fairly moldy year. Morris helped Bill Clinton, post-1994, refit his adaptable self to imitate those Republican positions that the polls said the public favored. When Jack Kemp signed on to the Dole ticket, he modified what had seemed, the week before, his principled positions on affirmative action and the children of illegal immigrants. At last week's convention, Al Gore's excruciatingly extended description of his own sister's death from lung cancer in 1984 was at preposterous variance with his hymn to tobacco farming while seeking votes in North Carolina in 1988. Late last week in the Washington Post, Gore explained that an "emotional numbness" after his sister's death "prevented me from integrating into all aspects of my life the implications of what that tragedy truly meant." This defense, best presented to Sally Jessy Raphael, introduces an interesting principle of nonaccountability that, say, Richard Nixon might have found useful in the midst of Watergate.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. With more mental channels to choose from than cable TV, Dick Morris could argue the case round or square or Rosicrucian or vegetarian, as long, one suspects, as the money was consistently green. Or maybe Morris was just beguiled by his own genius for spinning like a Sufi to whatever moral music the customer wished to play.

During the New Hampshire primary campaign of 1992, Bill Clinton--beset by the Gennifer Flowers scandal--managed to place himself under what might be called the "Nobody's Perfect" Exemption. Thus (somewhat mysteriously) protected, he went on to the White House. If John Kennedy had tried it in 1960, he would not have made it to the Democratic Convention.

But the evolution of the Kennedy myth after Dallas has set an American mood of moral disquiet and trompe l'oeil. Now you see it, now you don't. The shining story of Camelot has proceeded through the decades with an evil twin--the American tabloid version of the Kennedys, with Mafia molls and ruthless lusts and greeds: the gods as gangsters.

The important damage from the polymorphous con jobs on political display this year is symbolic and atmospheric. Morris' train wreck last week, compounded by his ideological promiscuity, adds to the widespread public suspicion that it takes an unwholesome personality--a professional liar or a power fetishist--to go into politics in the first place.The conventional rules of hypocrisy have been modernized by the principles of television--life as a continuously temporary hallucination. Just as an image on the screen five minutes ago is only a memory on the retina and has no necessary connection to the image on the screen right now, so a politician's moral position five minutes ago, or five years ago, does not have to conform to his opinion now. History as recorded by television is like Heraclitus' river: You cannot step in the same stream twice. And the wonderful secret is, you don't have to.