Posted on 12/04/2007 5:58:52 AM PST by STARWISE
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been holding private conversations with Dick Morris, according to aides, a long-standing relationship that is raising new questions as Huckabee’s campaign begins to take off.
Morris’ most prominent calling card has been with Bill Clinton — for two decades, starting in 1977, as his most influential (if sometimes erratic) political adviser and for the past decade as one of his most persistent (if sometimes erratic) public critics.
But the Arkansas connection the controversial consultant and commentator established through Clinton also brought Huckabee onto his client roster, beginning in 1993 when he advised the Republican’s winning campaign for lieutenant governor.
Morris lately has been lavishing praise in newspaper columns and television appearances on Huckabee, whose polished debate performances and recent gains in the polls in Iowa have given him a chance to penetrate the top tier among the GOP candidates.
“Mike Huckabee is on a roll,” Morris began one of his columns in The Hill newspaper last month. He also offers regular political analysis for Fox News and the New York Post.
Morris’ public touts of Huckabee sometimes come with disclosures of his past working relationship with the candidate, but they do not mention that the two men still talk regularly — an omission that could raise eyebrows among journalistic ethicists.
As Huckabee’s prospects become more serious, speculation about Morris’ role has blossomed in the small circle — sometimes incestuous, sometimes bitterly competitive — of national political operatives. Some accounts place Morris as an important figure among Huckabee’s kitchen cabinet of outside advisers.
Here is what is known: Morris and Huckabee confer with one another, according to two top Huckabee advisers — campaign manager Chip Saltsman and consultant Dick Dresner, who is himself a former business partner of Morris.
Here is what is not known: the exact dimensions of Morris’ current role with Huckabee or the degree to which his talks with the candidate are influencing campaign strategy.
Morris declined to be interviewed but said in an e-mail he talks with Huckabee casually and does not consider himself an adviser.
“He, like Rudy [Giuliani] and the staff of three or four other campaigns, are personal friends, and I chat with them from time to time, but nothing like an adviser,” Morris wrote on Friday.
“Yeah, they do,” Dresner said, when asked if Huckabee and Morris still actively confer.
“Just like you [in the press corps], he gets his calls returned. The difference is [Morris] has a close, personal relationship with the governor.”
Ongoing conversation
Dresner also has a long-standing relationship with Huckabee — but also with Morris.
The two New Yorkers have been friends on-and-off for nearly 40 years and previously were business partners. Dresner now serves as Huckabee’s pollster and media consultant, the only outside strategist retained on the former governor’s payroll.
Saltsman downplayed the significance of the talks between his candidate and Morris but acknowledged that the conversation is ongoing.
“He’s got lots of friends from his years as governor,” he said.
Asked hours after this story was first published whether he had been consulting with Morris, Huckabee himself sought to play down his contact with his former adviser — but then conceded that he thinks highly of Morris and still talks to him.
“I wish I had been,” Huckabee said in an interview on ABC's “This Week.” “Dick’s one of the smartest political minds, as you well know, in the business. I’ve known Dick for, gosh, almost, I guess, 18, 17 years. He was a political consultant for me in the early ’90s in the first races that I won.
“But Dick is not available for doing political consulting work. Frankly, I wish he was, because he’s a brilliant political mind, and I still consider him a friend. I run into him from time to time, or I may talk to him. But I probably talk to 30, 40 journalists a week. Most of them I talk to more than I talk to Dick Morris, and I haven’t talked to him in a while.”
Questions raised
But those who have worked around Morris said this mild description likely does not do justice to the full tang of the Morris-Huckabee talks.
For one thing, virtually any conversation with Morris is a ceaseless, occasionally manic, flow of political analysis and theorizing, historical analogies, predictions, importuning and advice.
It is implausible Morris would turn off this faucet for a strictly social chat with a former client who just happens to be running for president.
At a minimum, the previously unreported Huckabee-Morris conversations raise two sets of questions.
One set is political: What will conservatives think about Huckabee’s mind-melds with a consultant who, in addition to having a history of sexual scandal, is known as an apostle of exhaustively polled centrism that Morris coined “triangulation.”
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Huckabee is another Jimmy Carter. I don’t know if he’s more liberal than Rudy but the two are sure much to liberal to be in any high office.
Interesting that Morris would advise a candidate sure to lose to Hillary.
Another Arkansas jerk.
I’m getting used to politicians from my home state regularly embarassing it to the rest of the nation.
FRED VETS, SIGN UP TODAY AT:
Huckabee getting absolutely slaughtered on ABC’s GMA show as I write - they are interviewing the rape victim. Brutal PR.
I agree.
In that photo Huckabee has the eyes of a fanatic.
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