Political consultant Dick Morris addresses the Cornell Political Forum audience Nov. 8 in Kennedy Hall. University Photography
Cornell moved inside the Beltway for a few hours on Nov. 8 when the Cornell Political Forum, a nonpartisan undergraduate organization, presented two members of the punditocracy -- one of them notorious -- in a debate on the question of whether morality should play a role in politics.
Who could predict that former ABC newsman Bob Zelnick, the proponent for morality, and Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's triangulating former adviser, would find points of agreement before the debate was over? Throw Jeremy Rabkin, associate professor of government and moderator, into the consensus, and it was a strange group of bedfellows indeed.
Unlike most political talk shows, the forum's Fall Debate held to a strict format and participants did not raise their voices. Despite their similar groomed-for-TV hairstyles and dark gray suits -- offset by Rabkin's familiar professorial brown tweed jacket -- Zelnick and Morris presented very different debating styles. The former newsman read from notes behind the podium. Morris, without notes, wore a lapel mic and spoke from center stage.
"Morality is very admirable but also boring," Rabkin declared in opening the debate. He invoked Thucydides and Plato to describe the debate topic as "a great theme that goes back at least to ancient Athens." Leaping ahead to the "Clinton scandals," he accused the still-sitting president of being a rapist, before introducing the Emmy Award-winning Zelnick to present the first argument.
"After that introduction, I rest my case," Zelnick commented, to laughter from the more than 400 people in David L. Call Auditorium of Kennedy Hall. He noted that during his student days at Cornell -- he is a 1961 graduate of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations -- he saw conservative William F. Buckley debate socialist Norman Thomas in Bailey Hall.
Morality is "a legitimate political issue," Zelnick affirmed. Though he is "wary" of organized groups "using the political process to impose its morals," morality has a place in discussions of political and social issues like the cloning of human beings, he said. The judicial process tempers the zealots, he assured. Some areas of private morality are legitimate, he said, focusing on accusations of sexual misconduct by the president, who has been "credibly" accused of rape and sexual harassment.
Morris responded with his analysis of American history, in which "all of these things are relative." The democratic process weaves like a sailboat, he said, taking into account wind, tide, currents and destination.
"I don't defend Clinton's lack of morality, I have enough problems of my own," he said, getting a big laugh from the audience. Saying Clinton "may" have committed rape and expressing disappointment in him, Morris urged, "let's stay from the neck up."
Zelnick responded that the debate was not about "broad historical decisions or grand compromises Roosevelt may have made." He decried the "Clinton sexual scandals," "character assassinations of Ken Starr" and "phony assertions of executive privilege."
Morris responded by saying he agreed with everything Zelnick had said. Clinton "fell apart" in his second term because he had "no vision, no sense of where he was going."
In his summation, Morris said, "We're at the cusp of the end of the political system as we've known it for the last 30 or 40 years." That was the era of television, of political ads and image, when money controlled the television process. But two forces have changed the system: people have stopped watching TV, and they've started to use the Internet. Morris said more people are online during prime time than are watching network television. Fewer people are watching, but politicians are paying more to reach them.
"It's the last gasp of a dying system," he proclaimed. The Internet will change everything because money won't control access to people. He has launched a new web site, <vote.com>, on which people vote on issues; the site forwards the votes to elected officials and later informs citizens how their representatives voted.
"We will become a direct democracy," he said. "Politics will no longer be an involuntary one-way process, it will be voluntary and interactive. People who grew up in this system will find their experience as irrelevant as that of the bosses of Tammany Hall. ... We're about to find out if people want true democracy. The question of morality in politics won't matter. ... Frictionless, costless communication will replace the costly elitist one-way monologues that dominate our political process."
"I'm too frightened to speak," Zelnick responded. Noting he was still learning how to use e-mail, he said buffers would be needed between "popular passions and immediate decisions." Morris' vision would be a "dangerous way to run a democracy," he warned.
The Cornell Political Forum and Sigma Phi hosted a reception for the speakers after the debate. Asked there whether, in the end, the current Beltway obsession with "morality" wasn't really "just about sex," Morris smiled and offered his analysis.
"There were really two discussions going on," he said. "One was about Clinton and sex. The other was about morality and politics, whether the ends justify the means. They both used the word 'morality.' One should have used the word 'ethics,' and one 'promiscuity.'"
Students clustered in separate discussions with both men. Morris described generational differences in attitudes, and said that young people could be brought into the political process through Internet voting, which would "revolutionize their turnout." In response to concerns about access raised by students, he replied that his polls show that the most underrepresented group on the Internet is people over 65, not the poor or minorities.
He also described results of polls about behavior. Asked whether they don't use drugs, drink to excess or engage in promiscuous behavior because of a moral code or because of life experiences in seeing the consequences of those behaviors, Morris said overwhelmingly people over 55 used a moral code and those under 35 cited life experiences. "Boomers didn't give a damn," he added.
The forum's Melissa Astudillo, editor-in-chief, and Salumeh Ramsey, events director, said they were pleased with the turnout for the debate. Astudillo, and later Zelnick, said they were surprised that there were so many points that the debaters agreed upon. Morris, however, didn't find it surprising.
"Where we part," he explained, "is the difference in emphasis. For me, Clinton's achievements overshadow his failings. For Bob, they don't."
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