ABSTRACT
This book begins with Bill Clinton chewing out his consultants, DickMorris and Doug Schoen, warning them not to undermine his pres-idency. When the Dick Morris scandal erupted during the 237
summer of 1996, frustration with celebrity political consultants had reached a boiling point. Senator Jay Rockefeller expressed what many elected officials felt about high-profile consultants: “I don’t like it,” he said, “they’ve become the interpreters of everything. They get on TV shows and reveal how they tell the politicians where to go and what to do.”1 Senator Patrick Leahy also weighed in: “I think it’s wrong. It’s the people who elect the candidate, not the consultants. If their egos become so great, it can lead to the sort of trouble we’re seeing here [with Dick Morris]. I don’t think necessarily you should fire them. Maybe just draw, quarter and behead them.”2 Even former political consultant Lyn Nofziger was in the mood to get rid of them all: “You’d think that the nation had never gotten along without them. But I will tell you this: we’d still have elections, and someone would win and someone would lose, if we assassinated every one of the consultants, and the country might be better off.”3
