EPISODE 181 – DICK MORRIS, ADVISOR TO BILL & HILLARY CLINTON, POLITICAL AUTHOR, STRATEGIST

You’re going to love this short but intense interview with a close confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Dick Morris.

Dick has recently authored a New York Times best seller called “Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary”. Dick shares his views about the current political situation surrounding the 2016 Presidential Election and also shares his advice on how lawyers can ‘campaign’ successfully to grow their law practice. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

 

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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Secrets of Attorney Marketing Secrets podcast. Richard Jacobs is the best-selling author of Secrets of Attorney Marketing Law School Dares Not Teach available on Amazon, Kindle, and audible.com. Richard has helped over 650 attorneys nationwide in 17 different practice areas to attract more clients and grow their law firms. This podcast gives you the details and strategies of how top attorneys and industry experts became successful. You’re going to discover how to take their ideas and grow your law practice by leaps and bounds in the next 12 months. Now, here’s your host, Richard Jacobs.

Speaker 2: This is the Secrets of Attorney Marketing podcast from Speakeasy Authority Marketing. Discover how to enhance your reputation as an attorney and out-market your competitors. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

Richard: Hi. This is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing, and I’m very excited to be speaking with Dick Morris, a long-time political consultant who has worked directly with Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as many other political figures the past 40-plus years. Dick is also the best-selling author of what looks to be 20 or more books about various political figures, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama, Condoleezza Rice and more. Dick’s latest book, co-authored with his wife, Eileen, is called Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary, and it’s currently on the New York Times Bestseller List for 10-plus weeks. Dick, welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for coming.

Dick: Good to be here, Rich and thanks for having me.

Richard: You recently co-authored the book Armageddon. It’s a bestseller. What prompted you to write it, and do you believe it’s important that every voting American read this before the election?

Dick: What prompted me to write it is because I think the Republicans have lost the last two elections by just running the same campaign over and over again, and falling short. Another campaign would have the same results, with the disaster that Hillary might be elected. I wanted to lay out an alternate strategy. First present all the evidence against Hillary. The book exposes every argument, every scandal, every lie you can think of. Then the rest of it is a strategy for how to go about beating her, but the important point is that one audience was Donald Trump himself, and he’s read it.
The other audience is the individual Trump supporter, because unlike other recent elections, this is an election that is waged at the kitchen table. There are families where one is for Trump and the other for Hillary, or you go to a parents association meeting and you find it evenly split. You go to your child’s soccer game and the parents are evenly divided. We have to win all of those one-on-one arguments to be able to win this election. I wrote the book to guide everybody in how to make the case.

Richard:   In your history, you seem to have supported a lot of Democrats for various offices, and now it looks like, at least for this election, you’re on the Republican side.

Dick:   I used to be a Democrat, and then in the 80s I became a Republican. When Bill Clinton called me in to save his presidency, I actually was a Republican, and part of the reason he called me in was because I knew what they had for breakfast. I’d worked for them, and I understood how to appeal to them, and that was a key part of what I did, and I did it because he was President, and because you don’t want the President to fail. I’ve never had a personal anger at the President or at Hillary.

Richard:   The mainstream media seems more warped than I’ve ever seen it. Why do you think that they’re so one-sided, seemingly, to be on Hillary’s side and so against Trump? Why is it like that?

Dick:   I think that the whole theme of the Hillary campaign has been to make it stylistically gauche to be for Trump. That’s a bit of a pun. Gauche means left, but in this case the right is left, and it’s awkward, and the beautiful people would never support Trump. The cool kids would never support Trump. Those for Trump are the rednecks, the Islamophobics, the know-nothings, the gun-toting bigots, the crazy religious, and if you’re going to support Trump you’re part of that basket of deplorables, as Hillary said, or as Bill Clinton said, the rednecks.
It’s all designed to shame people about not being for Trump, and ultimately the media is driven by just such considerations. They don’t so much care about ratings as they care about public approval. Their promotions depend on it. Their Pulitzer Prizes and Emmys depend on it, and they care much more about the in-crowd liking them than they do about the actual outcome of the election. They bend over backwards because that’s what the in-crowd wants.

Richard: How has the mainstream media treated your book, Armageddon? I know it’s on the New York Times Bestseller List, but you know.

Dick:   It has subtlety and completely ignored my book. The only time my book has ever appeared in the New York Times is at the top of the bestseller list. They haven’t reviewed it. They haven’t commented on it. NBC, ABC and CBS, none of them have had me on for an interview. Neither has CNN or NBC. It’s a subtle and complete blackout.

Richard:   Wow.

Dick:   That’s because the book is very effective in laying out the case against Hillary and articulating how she can be defeated, so the silence is a badge of honor, but amid the silence, I’ve sold 150,000 copies so far.

Richard:   How do you have the stamina? I watch your daily videos. I see you putting out content multiple times a day every day. How do you do that for so long and why do you do it?

Dick:   I feel like a one-man machine, doing interviews and TV shows. Every day I do a lunch alert, which you were referring to, which is for my online users. I have half a million of them, and if you go to dickmorris.com and sign up, I’ll send it to you every single morning, and it’s a different commentary on what’s happening that day in politics. Because I’m denied access to the establishment. I could relax and just do one gig on Meet the Press or on 60 Minutes every week and I would reach everybody, but you can’t when you’re shut out, so I work like hell at reaching everybody in 100 different ways.

Richard: I like what you have to say because it’s never hurling epithets. You always have a historical basis for what you say, and I learn a lot just about how you respond to all these issues, so you put out great content.

Dick: Just today I was thinking that everybody’s focusing now on the war between Paul Ryan and the Republican establishment on the one hand and Donald Trump on the other. They’re saying, “This is a rift in the party. This will divide the Republicans.” I wrote a book about 15 years ago called Power Plays, and in it I described five strategies for getting power. Then in each case I give examples of politicians who’ve used it and those who have tried and failed with it.
One of the strategies was reform your own party, and I said that if you can criticize your own party, and in that critique mirror the criticisms that are thrown at your party by the other party and by independents, and you’re saying the same things yourself, people will come and vote for you because they’ll say, “He’s going to clean up the bad parts of his party.” That’s what Tony Blair did in Britain by opposing the labor unions and the crazy left wingers, and people said, “I would have wanted to vote labor, but I never did because of the unions and the lefties, but Blair is changing it, so I think I can vote for him.” In the center, that’s what Trump is doing now. He’s saying, “I’m against the establishment of the party,” and all of the voters who feel that way are drawn to his candidacy.

Richard: How did you become a political consultant?

Dick: I was one of the first consultants in the country in politics, and I mentioned ’78, ’77, I had worked for all kinds of people in New York State where I’m from.
In 1977, I had worked in the past, in the 70s for all kinds of politicians in New York, and I wanted to go national. I picked up the phone and called everybody who was running for Senator or Governor, that was not an incumbent, and one of the people I called was Bill Clinton, who was the Attorney-General of Arkansas then. I flew out and we hit it off, and for 20 years I was his chief advisor.

Richard: What was that like working with him when he was President? Tell me about the experience.

Dick: Bill is incredibly brilliant. He’s got an amazing mind, and he’s sometimes hard to understand how he comes up with his different moves because it’s his own thought process and you have to work, and you have to understand it, and you have to really go into it with him. I was able to do it. It’s like sort of reading a code, cracking the Clinton code, and I learned how to do it and it was great. We did a lot of wonderful things for the country that I pushed: the welfare reform, the balanced budget, the work on making health insurance anti-smoking, anti-drug stuff, family and medical leave. All that stuff was stuff that I worked with him on and I was thrilled to have done it. It’s quite a heady feeling and a wonderful feeling of accomplishment.

Richard: One of the stories you talked about how you thought Putin may be trying to sabotage Hillary’s campaign. Would you be willing to share maybe one more story?

Dick: I think it’s going to be very major in the next few weeks. Yesterday, Podesta, Hillary’s manager, said that he thinks Putin was behind the latest WikiLeaks stuff about his emails coming out, and Hillary said that she thought he was behind the Wasserman Schultz emails coming out.

Richard: Right.

Dick: Obama said yesterday that the United States would have a proportionate response if Russia continued to hack emails of American political leaders. I think that what’s going on here is that Putin has Hillary’s deleted email and that at the appropriate time he’s going to release them, and I think that Hillary is scared to death of that and is trying to lay in the predicate that Putin is for Trump, that Trump is in cahoots with Putin, and that this is an unauthorized intervention in our politics, and when this comes out don’t pay attention to what’s in the emails. Don’t pay attention to the fact that I obviously compromised national security on my private server because the enemy just showed up with all 2,000 of my emails. Don’t pay any attention to that. Just pay attention to the peripheral issue of is Putin trying to intervene in the US election?

Richard: You’ve done some political advising, again, for the highest of the high. Do regular people, or people in business need a political adviser and what would be the benefit of having someone like you if they did?

Dick: I’ve often worked for commercial clients or trade groups. Everything is a political campaign these days. We’re plagued with negatives and positives and the same level of dialog, and it’s just that political consultants are better at it, so I think we can be of help.

Richard: I mean I see that it requires skillful positioning so you get the votes you need or the business you want, get the clients you want. Any insights you have about positioning: polling, optics, that would help my listeners and everyone listening grow their business or achieve their goals whatever they may be?

Dick: Your listeners are mainly trial lawyers or all kinds of attorneys?

Richard: All kind of attorneys, but a lot of trial lawyers.

Dick: I think that the key element there is to use survey research in your business to understand what people think about the issues before you go into them. There’s a certain extent of kind of flying by the seat of your pants, and that’s sometimes a mistake. I was hired once in connection with an air crash. When a Missouri Governor was killed in a plane crash, Carnahan, and everybody was very sympathetic with him, and I was hired by the insurance companies to fight against a huge damage award.
Everybody thought that empathy and sympathy would win the day, and that Carnahan would get a big judgment, and I said, “No. Don’t settle. Hang in there and litigate it,” and I found that once people learned the facts of the situation they were not inclined to give him a big award. I remember the insurance company I was looking at settling for 20-40 million dollars. I said don’t and they ended up with a one million dollar verdict against them.

Richard: How much has come true so far and what do you think is going to happen from here until the election?

Dick: Well, I think Trump has been using the strategies in there very effectively. His focus on school choice, letting parents send their children to any school they want, private or church, and have the state pay for it, has been very effective in making inroads into the African-American community. I think that his focus on Obamacare and what a disaster it’s been, I think has been very helpful to the average American who is facing these issues. I think that if you read the newspaper and you read my book side by side, you’ll see one of us is topping the other.

Richard: Excellent. Well, thanks so much for your time, and again listeners can go to dickmorris.com to get your daily lunch alert and a lot of great insights, so thank you for coming.

Dick: Thank you.

 

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