Former Presidential Advisor Dick Morris Talks about Condi vs. Hillary in 2008

Who will be elected president in 2008?  If you ask Dick Morris, former President Clinton’s political consultant for decades, he will tell you that it will be Hillary Clinton.  That is, unless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decides to run as the Republican candidate.

In his new book, Condi vs. Hillary:  The Next Great Presidential Race, Dick Morris, together with his wife Eileen McGann, write about how the two women seem fated to meet on the grand stage of presidential politics.  Mr. Morris joined CFIF Senior Vice President & Corporate Counsel Renee Giachino recently on “Your Turn – Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense” to discuss the recent bestseller, insider insight and political foresight. 

What follows are excerpts from the interview that aired on WEBY 1300 AM, Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio.

GIACHINO:  My next guest served as Bill Clinton’s political consultant for twenty years and is universally credited with piloting Clinton to a stunning comeback re-election victory in 1996.  He has managed dozens of other successful political campaigns.  He is a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular contributor to Fox News Channel.  He has written several books, his latest is the topic of our interview this afternoon – a book called Condi vs. Hillary:  The Next Great Presidential Race. 

Please welcome Dick Morris.  Mr. Morris, thank you for joining us on the program.

MORRIS:  Okay Renee I am going to have to call you by your last name unless you call me “Dick.”

GIACHINO:  Okay, I will then because my last name can be very difficult to pronounce so I will make it easy for both of us.

Your other works include Rewriting History, Because He Could, Power Plays, and Behind the Oval Office.  Now, your latest book, surely another New York Times bestseller is “Condi vs. Hillary:  The Next Great Presidential Race.”  This recently released book, which you co-authored with Eileen McGann – your wife, as I understand it, examines one of the scenarios that could lie in store for the 2008 presidential race – Republican Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice against Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton.

Before I read this book I would not have thought of that scenario, but you make the case in this book that I now have to agree.  What motivated you to write this book?

MORRIS:  I wrote the book since I scared the hell out of everybody with my previous book Rewriting History that was the rebuttal to Hillary’s book Living History. It explains who Hillary Clinton really is and how, if she were president, she would be like a Democratic Nixon.  And I figured I owed it to the world to provide an antidote.  I believe that Hillary will be elected the 44^th president, unless Condoleezza Rice runs as the Republican nominee.

The math is very simple.  White men would vote against Hillary 2 to 1.  But they also voted against Gore 2 to 1.  They also voted against Kerry 2 to 1.  The moving piece in our politics are white women and they gave Bush a resounding mandate in 2004 by voting for him by 14 points.  But in 2000, when Bush lost the popular vote, they broke even. 

So I think Hillary will run a lot better than Gore or Kerry did among white women.  I think that she is probably going to win the white female vote by 10 or 15 points.  She won it by 28 points when she was running for Senator of New York.  And that is the ballgame.  That is it.  I don’t think you can generate a higher Republican turn-out than you did the last time.  Everybody who was alive voted.  Bush got 12 million more votes out of the turn-out increase of 20%.

So I think the answer has to be to nominate a woman.  This is the first of its kind and it is only going to be met by another first of its kind challenging it.  And then on top of that, Condi would have the additional advantage of being very effective with the African American vote.  And blacks have always voted 90% Democratic.  But Condi, as an African American woman, would have tremendous appeal to the black vote and probably walk away with 1/3 of it.  And 1/3 of it is 4 million votes.  You take 4 million away from the Democrats and give them to the Republicans, which is 8 million.  And Bush won by 3 million, so you have 11 million.  That is almost a 10% landslide.

That math I think is just so compelling.  Hillary would win if Condi did not run, but Condi could beat her.

GIACHINO:  But for all that to happen, Condi has to run.  Unlike Hillary – in the book you inform us that she has had the intent to run for president ever since her husband’s presidency started, well Rice does not at all seem interested in the job.  What would it take to convince her and who do you think could?

MORRIS:  That is why I wrote the book with my wife this year as opposed to 2007 because if we are going to succeed in getting Rice to run, we have to build it for her.  If we build it, she will come, like the “Field of Dreams” movie.  If we have Condi, organizations in each district and they raise money and they attract support and they get delegates put on the ballot and they start winning straw polls and conventions and then some caucuses and then some primary, that is going to generate a momentum that I think will be irresistible. 

You know, I want to make sure Renee that all of your listeners know that in dating and in social relationships “no means no.”  But in politics it doesn’t. 

I think that Condi is right now very focused on Secretary of State.  It is a very challenging job and it works no distractions and she is right for focusing on that.  But I think that if she feels that America wants her to be the Republican nominee, that Republicans all over the country are voting for her and supporting her, much like Eisenhower in 1952 who didn’t even tell people if he was a Democrat or Republican and then won the nomination at the New Hampshire primary as a write-in, I think Condi will do her duty.

You know, there is a way to say no in politics and it was invented by General William Tecumseh Sherman on his way through Georgia when he commented back in 1884 that he said “If nominated, I refuse to run.  And if elected, I will not serve.”

She has not said that.  In fact, The Washington Times asked her if she would give a Sherman pledge and she said that “she did not think that was really fair.”  If she said that, I’d stop bothering her.  But right now she has not.  So I think it is very important that we build a candidacy that attracts the candidate.  And wouldn’t it be a relief to have a campaign that is not fueled by the ambition of the candidate but by our sense of what a great president she would make?

GIACHINO:  It would be refreshing, for sure.

Dick, in the book Condi vs. Hillary, you argue that Rice’s chances would be better because she is single.  Doesn’t Hillary’s marriage (or whatever you want to call it) to Bill Clinton help her in some respect?

MORRIS:  Yes, sure it does.  My point was not really that it is because she is single.  That’s part of it.  My point was that Condi’s life experience is so much more relevant to the average voter and particularly to the average woman, as compared to Hillary’s life experience.

Every single thing that Hillary has ever accomplished in her life, she got because of her husband’s career.  She was hired to her first law firm job because he became the state’s attorney general; she made partner because he became the governor; she got health care reform because he became the president.  And then when she wanted to run for the Senate, because her husband was president and really for no other reason, she was able to win the Democratic nomination in a state she had never lived in, New York – a very fractious state, divided Democratic Party, and she walked in without a primary and got the $45 million dollars she needed to win that seat.  Does anybody in their right mind believe that that would have happened if her husband were not president?

Yet Condi, as a single woman, has earned everything that she has got.  She graduated first in her class at the University of Denver – 19 years old when she graduated.  She got a Masters and Ph.D.  At 26, she was a tenured professor at Stanford.  At 34, she becomes so fluent in Russian and so able to understand Eastern Europe and Soviet strategy that she was appointed by President Bush as the chief advisor on dealing with the Soviet Union in 1989.  A 35 year-old woman is supervising American foreign policy and in fact met with Gorbachev many times and spoke with him alone in Russian.  And then she goes back to become provost of Stanford, running a $2 billion university.  And then she goes back and becomes Bush’s chief foreign policy advisor.

And look at what she has accomplished in the last 7 months.  North Korea is abandoning its nuclear ambitions; the Sunnis in Iraq are participating in the Constitutional referendum and accepting the Constitution; the Israelis withdrawing from the Gaza; and a united global effort against Iran – not the go-it-alone effort that dominated our policy toward Iraq.

So I think that she has an incredible record that is not derivative of a man – it is her record.

GIACHINO:  Dick, I have to confess that until I read your book I did not really know enough about Condi Rice to even consider voting for her.  We all probably know way too much about Hillary.  Do you think it helps or hurts Condi that despite all of her success, and you do a fabulous job of educating us from her childhood to now of everything that she has done, but do you think that despite all of that success the American public really knows very little about her to vote for her?

MORRIS:  No, that is why I wrote the book.  I didn’t know much about her and I am just amazed, amazed about her background.  This woman learned to read music before she could read letters at the age of four years old.  She was such a world class concert pianist that recently she performed at the Kennedy Center.  In high school, she almost made the U.S. Figure Skating Team.  She is completely fluent in French and Russian – she speaks the language of both of our adversaries.

GIACHINO:  If Condi won’t run, you happen to reference in the book that Forbes magazine recently ranked Condi as number one and Hillary as number twenty-six in its 2005 list of the most powerful women in the world.  Is there anyone else from that list that could make a run at Hillary and potentially win?

MORRIS:  I don’t think there is another woman that could run.  And I think that the two men who could run, probably can’t get the nomination:  one is Giuliani, who would make a wonderful president but he is pro-choice, he is for gun control, he is for affirmative action, he is for civil unions, he is for immigration – he fails all of the litmus tests.  I don’t think he could win the Republican primaries.

And then you have John McCain who is known as a maverick and quite independent, not considered reliable in the Republican inner circles.  In 2000, we realized that he doesn’t attract the Republican votes.  He can get Independents, but not Republicans, and that is not enough to win the nomination.

The guy who probably would win the nomination are guys like Bill Frist and George Allen and Chuck Haigel from Nebraska or Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania and George Pataki from New York but I don’t think those white men would attract white women against Hillary.  Again, I think that the hoopla and the intensity and driven quality of speculation of a first woman president is so intense that women would flock to vote for Hillary unless there is another woman on the ballot drawing them away.

GIACHINO:  Well I carried this book around with me for about a week while I was reading it and I had a lot of people stop and ask me about it.  One gentleman asked me to ask you your thoughts on Mitt Romney.

MORRIS:  I think he is one of the numbers of white men who would be perfectly acceptable Republican candidates, but there is no basis for accepting that he would be particularly attractive to women.

It was very unusual for George Bush to carry the white woman vote in 2004.  Republicans have been losing that vote year after year after year.  It was why Clinton was elected and re-elected.  And the reason that Republicans have been losing them is because their issues and interests are basically Democrat – they are into education, and health care, and a range of issues that are normally Democratic issues.  And the reason they voted for Bush was because of their feeling that he could keep us safe in a way that Kerry couldn’t.

I think Condi Rice taps right into that with her expertise on national security, her knowledge in fighting terrorism.  I cannot think of anybody who’s better equipped to wage the War on Terror than the person who has been winning it so far.

GIACHINO:  In the book, Condi vs. Hillary, you write about the type of President that each woman would make.  You also write, and you have alluded to this in this interview, about how different these potential candidates are, describing them as mirror images of each other.  To quote, you say “not only white/black but north/south; Democrat/Republican; married/single; suburban/urban; and, in their policy interests, domestic/foreign.”  What former president would you compare Clinton to and how about Rice?

MORRIS:  Hillary Clinton I would compare to Richard Nixon.  There is the same quality of “ruthlessness” and “chip on her shoulder” and “enemies list” and “vast right-wing conspiracy” and “world is against us” and all that stuff.  There is that same quality of feeling single doubt for ill treatment by the universe.  You see it in her memoirs and you see it in her statements and, if you know her, you see it in her.

I think that Condi Rice in many respects may be a lot like Eisenhower:  very focused on international affairs, on building a global coalition – in his case to fight communism, and in our case to fight drugs and terrorism.  And I think there is also a healing quality to Rice where she attracts allies, supporters and friends, rather than Hillary who is much more focused on combat.

But you know Renee, the comparison that I find most interesting is Bill and Hillary.  Because they are opposites.  Bill is brilliant; Hillary is okay.  Bill is instinctual; Hillary is not.  Bill is creative; Hillary is not a creative person but she does things by rote.  She is good at advocacy but not at formulating a position.  One time she was creative with health care reform and watch out.  And Bill is very generous – he does not have enemies and does not keep grudges, he is very open and wants people to like him and he wants to like people; Hillary is very closed and very paranoid and often very ruthless.

I will share with you a story.  In August of 1996, they had a fundraising birthday party for Bill at the Radio City Music Hall in New York and a bunch of gay demonstrators came into the orchestra section and started acting up and yelling insults at Bill and the cops pulled them out.  Nobody thought much about it.  And a few days later I was meeting with Hillary to go through the plans for the Democratic convention which was going to come up shortly.  And she said, “were you at that party?”  And I said, “yes, I was.”  And she said, “Did you see those demonstrators?”  And I said, “Yes, they were hard to miss.”  And she said “Do you know how much they paid for those tickets?”  And I said, “Boy do I.  They are $1,000 each and I had to cough up for two of them.”  And she said, “Do they have $1,000?  Do those demonstrators have $1,000 to buy those tickets?  No, they don’t.  Somebody else paid for them.  The Republicans are paying for them.  They put them in that audience to demonstrate and disrupt things and to disrupt the birthday party and they are going to do the same thing at our convention.  We are going to have them all over the galleries and all over the spectator field and whenever Bill or I speak they are going to jump up and yell and scream and cameras will focus on them.  There will be no focus on us or our mission or issues or accomplishments.  I want security, I want screening, I want social security numbers, I want background checks and I want to know everybody who is in that seat at that convention and I want them vetted.”

So I smiled and nodded my head which I was often forced to do when she was on one of these jihads.  The next day, I was with Bill and I said, “You know Hillary is really into some kind of crazy top security deal and she wants everybody to be vetted.”  And he said, “We are not going to do that S-H-I-T.”

GIACHINO:  He completely dismissed her.

Assuming that your book Condi vs. Hillary can convince Condi that she needs to run and that she will win her party’s nomination, who do you envision as her running mate, and how about Hillary Clinton’s?

MORRIS:  I don’t know about hers, but the one thing I do know is that if Condi runs, the Democrats will probably try to put an African American on the ticket to win back the black vote.

I don’t think my book is going to convince Condi to run for President.  I hope that my book convinces Americans throughout the country to volunteer their time, read my book, it is a manual for how to do it – to set up Condi clubs and really begin the grassroots swell.  And that really is what will convince Condi to run for President.

GIACHINO:  Dick, we have had some callers call in with questions they wanted me to ask you.  I know in the book you do a great job, and I encourage the listeners to pick up the book so that they can learn more about each of these potential candidates, but also more about the polling data that is in the book.  It is very interesting information.  Well, one of the callers wants to know what percent of Republican voters, if you know this, hinge their vote on anti-abortion issues?

MORRIS:  Probably about 20% of the total Republican vote would select pro-life as the single most important issue.  There is another group that does things like gay marriage and overall religious attitude, but specifically on the pro-life/pro-choice issue, it is about one-fifth.

GIACHINO:  The caller also wants to know if the pro-life block will remain loyal to the Republican Party if Condi becomes a candidate?

MORRIS:  Yes, I think they will.  I think that Condi is basically pro-life.  She is concerned about stem cell research and Medicaid funding, she is for parental notification and against third trimester abortion.  On the actual issue of Roe v. Wade, I think she said she basically is undecided.  She basically feels that life begins at conception but is concerned about government intrusion and I think that as her views develop – as she begins focusing on it, and remembers she has not had to focus too much on domestic issues, I think that you will see that she will be pretty good on that issue.

You know she also has been pretty active in trying to cut off American aide to international organizations that promote abortion.

GIACHINO:  So this next question you may have already answered.  I’m going to ask it anyway.  Is the system so entrenched in a two-party monopoly that a third party pro-life candidate would still have no chance?

MORRIS:  Would have no chance because everybody is so focused on Hillary not winning that nobody is going to tolerate a division of the party vote.  Look at how bad Nader fared in this election because people were so entrenched and the Democrats were so focused on beating Bush.  That’s how it would be in 2008.  Whoever is the Republican nominee will have strong and enthusiastic support from the entire party because everybody’s fear of Hillary.

GIACHINO:  This is just a trivia question – what would a female president’s husband, assuming she had one, be called – the first man?

MORRIS:  I guess.  The first husband?  You know Hillary and Condi are both single women, it is just that Hillary has a husband hanging around somewhere.

GIACHINO:  Undoubtedly, television taints our viewpoints.  Do you think the new show Commander-in-Chief is designed in part to prepare us for a female president? 

MORRIS:  To prepare us for Hillary.  It is a sixty minute ad, once a week, for Hillary in prime-time.  One of the people who is paid to design the program as a consultant is a person who is probably number one on Hillary’s staff in terms of closeness to her, and they just hired Sandy Berger as a consultant.

While I think it is a good show, and by the way I do think it is pretty realistic about what life is like in the White House, it really is a forerunner of Hillary.

GIACHINO:  Perhaps it never crossed their minds that it could help a Republican candidate as well – say Condi.

MORRIS:  I bet that it didn’t.

GIACHINO:  Well, Dick that is all the time that we have.  It has been great having you on the program.

MORRIS:  Thanks, it is a great program.

GIACHINO:  It has been our pleasure.  We have been talking with Dick Morris, he is the author, together with his wife Eileen McGann, of the recently released book called Condi vs. Hillary:  The Next Great Presidential Race.  I encourage all of the listeners to buy the book and read it.  It is a very interesting book and maybe a precursor to the 2008 race.  Thank you again Mr. Morris for joining us.