Dick Morris had hardly boarded a plane on his way out of Chicago after revelations of his toe-sucking escapades before Democrats were telling the joke: "Did you hear that Sherry Rowlands was having an affair with a prostitute?"
Even when bivouacked in the heartland, the Beltway gang shoots its wounded.There was a legitimate scandal in the Clinton campaign last month, but it had little to do with Rowlands, the politically ambidextrous Clinton consultant's $200-an-hour companion at the Jefferson Hotel. After all, Morris isn't running for anything, so who cares whom he sleeps with?
Rather, the scandal has everything to do with Clinton's choice of advice.
And, in a much larger sense, it has to do with the kind of people and behavior that American culture now celebrates.
Jeffersongate (it's time we got back to naming our -gate scandals, like the original one, after the scene of the crime) may say even more about the tawdriness of America's public morals than it does about Morris' private ones.
Case in point: A couple of network talking heads debate who had been damaged most by this indecorous affair, Clinton or Morris? Neither one mentions the name of Eileen McGann, Morris' wife. Violations of marriage vows, it seems, have achieved the status of parking tickets.
(McGann, sad to say, stood by her man, albeit grimly. Just once, wouldn't you like to hear a pol's jilted wife call him a "filthy toe-sucking pig" and slug him in the chops with the cameras rolling?)
Case in point: Morris, in the grand PR tradition of making silk purses from sow's ears, wasted no time hanging his head; he promptly negotiated a bigger book deal with a publisher who assured us that this would be "a book about the governance of America." How reassuring. There may be hope for us if Random House loses its shirt on the deal. But don't bet on it.
"Doing something heinous used to get you in trouble," wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "Now it gets you into a higher tax bracket."
Morris is one of an increasingly pervasive breed in American politics, a campaign gun for hire but with an unusual, if not quite unique, talent - he could work both sides of the aisle. With Morris, wrote the Weekly Standard, "the role of the professional strategist in American politics rises to the level of pure caricature."
Major politicians have had their political fixers for decades, of course. Woodrow Wilson had his Colonel House, FDR his Louis Howe, Truman his Clark Clifford, repairmen who devoted entire careers to protecting a single man.
But until the modern People magazine era, they shared passions for anonymity, humility and loyalty.
Anonymity, because they knew that smoothing the ruffled feathers of bruised egos was easier without the preconceived baggage of celebrity. Humility, because they understood that fixing the glitches in malfunctioning political machines produced more reliable results than indulging the arrogance of designing new ones. And loyalty, because their own futures were intertwined with their boss.
Ronald Reagan's Michael Deaver was a harbinger of the new era, a man more adept at shaping images than damping fires. Yet even he only brightened the colors on the artwork he was given; he made no attempt to reinvent Reagan, who came to office fully formed politically.
And now comes Clinton, whose political persona has been a work in progress since high school student government.
For Morris, the amoral mercenary, he was the ideal client - the plastic man waiting to be shaped and reshaped. From a policy perspective, the real scandal of Dick Morris is the manner in which he sucked all principle from the public debate. In his hands, a campaign is nothing but a succession of differing carnival spiels ("come see the fancy school uniforms! peek at the incredible day-care grant!") designed to lure various sucker groups into the tent.
Lyndon Johnson, of course, did much the same thing and called it the Great Society, but he had a theme - more government could do more wonderful things.
With Clinton, it makes no difference. More government, less government, it's just a question of picking the right spiel. He should adopt a favorite word of Dole's as his slogan - "whatever." It's all just a bridge to the 21st century, doncha know?
Dick Morris was run out of town for the wrong reason. Not because he lacked principle, or even because he sucked Sherry's toes, but because he aroused inconvenient memories that Bill Clinton, understandably, did not want awakened.
Last fall, when Colin Powell opted out of the presidential race, he said something quite remarkable by modern political standards when he spoke of the need "to restore a sense of shame in our society."
No wonder he got out of the race. He knew an impossible task when he saw one.