DOES THE MORRIS THING MATTER?

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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. With more mental channels to choose from than cable TV, Dick Morris could argue the case round or square or Rosicrucian or vegetarian, as long, one suspects, as the money was consistently green. Or maybe Morris was just beguiled by his own genius for spinning like a Sufi to whatever moral music the customer wished to play.

During the New Hampshire primary campaign of 1992, Bill Clinton--beset by the Gennifer Flowers scandal--managed to place himself under what might be called the "Nobody's Perfect" Exemption. Thus (somewhat mysteriously) protected, he went on to the White House. If John Kennedy had tried it in 1960, he would not have made it to the Democratic Convention.

But the evolution of the Kennedy myth after Dallas has set an American mood of moral disquiet and trompe l'oeil. Now you see it, now you don't. The shining story of Camelot has proceeded through the decades with an evil twin--the American tabloid version of the Kennedys, with Mafia molls and ruthless lusts and greeds: the gods as gangsters.

The important damage from the polymorphous con jobs on political display this year is symbolic and atmospheric. Morris' train wreck last week, compounded by his ideological promiscuity, adds to the widespread public suspicion that it takes an unwholesome personality--a professional liar or a power fetishist--to go into politics in the first place.The conventional rules of hypocrisy have been modernized by the principles of television--life as a continuously temporary hallucination. Just as an image on the screen five minutes ago is only a memory on the retina and has no necessary connection to the image on the screen right now, so a politician's moral position five minutes ago, or five years ago, does not have to conform to his opinion now. History as recorded by television is like Heraclitus' river: You cannot step in the same stream twice. And the wonderful secret is, you don't have to.