intel

Dick Morris Is Still Mad at the Clintons

He doesn’t look mad, but he is.Photo: Getty Images

Dick Morris, the Clinton consultant turned Clinton tormentor, has a new book out, Fleeced, which goes after all his usual nemeses. So why, again, is he so mad at his former employers? Steve Fishman asked him.

Your book has an angry, fulminating tone. I don’t understand why you are so hostile toward the Clintons. Bill Clinton made your career.
We helped each other’s career. I think I was instrumental in his political career, and he was instrumental in my consultant career. We both gave as good as we got. When I worked for him, money wasn’t very important. When I worked for Hillary, she was a campaign manager and a damn good one. I began to see a variance between the people I knew and the people I saw in public, either because they’ve changed, as in the case of Bill, or they’re putting on a façade, as in the case of Hillary. She began her public career with essentially a lie. I don’t think she was a New Yorker; I don’t think she should have been elected senator from New York.

I think Bill’s post-presidency has been as revolting as Carter’s was edifying. Go to the relationship with Dubai. There is no postpresidential activity nearly as fascinating as becoming the chief financial adviser, in effect, for a guy [Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and Prime Minister of the U.A.E.] who’s the object of a recently dropped class-action suit because of State Department pressure against kidnapping young boys to become camel jockeys .

George H. W. Bush did essentially the same thing.
That may be true. That may be accurate. I paid more attention to Bill’s post-presidency than Bush’s because I know him so well.

Is this different from the Bill and Hillary you know?
The Bill that I last met, or at least last spoke with in the very early months of ‘98, was quite different. Yeah he had his affairs and all of that stuff, but he had no greed, he had no focus on money. Hillary was not phony in any sense. And then you see this complete change in them and you just wonder where it came from.

That’s politics, no?
I think everybody wears makeup; I think only she wears a mask.

Dick Morris Is Still Mad at the Clintons