THE NEW PRINCE: Machiavelli Updated for the 21st Century.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan
• Position: Review

THE NEW PRINCE Machiavelli Updated for the 21st Century by Dick Morris St. Martins, $21.95

Dick Morris is America's most pathetic political consultant. When his name comes up in political and media circles, it's as if there's a bad odor in the air. Beyond the toe-sucking jokes and stories about his obnoxious on-air (and off-air) performances, Morris seems to represent everything that's wrong with our politics--lack of principle, disloyalty, obsession with polls, and sleazy personal behavior. He can't even fake modesty, refusing, for instance, to acknowledge here that he blew it when he predicted huge GOP gains in the 1998 midterm elections.

And yet. Maybe he has a Mephistopheles effect on me, but I still think the guy is very smart about the subtleties of American politics. When he worked for President Clinton, I put the ratio at about one brilliant idea for every nine duds. His syndicated column is full of dumb theories, like suggesting Hillary Clinton was raising money in New York for a campaign somewhere else. In this book, his batting average improves. Although it is not nearly universal enough about the nature of power to bear his typically grandiose comparisons to Machiavelli, Morris' little volume is the kind of book where you find something to underline on practically every page.

For instance, Morris is the first to plausibly explain how the Internet will change politics, which he says is moving from "trust" in representatives and experts to "self-reliance"--from a Republic to a democracy. Soon enough, he writes, we'll have "web town meetings," which will function much like the referendum process in California, where the legislature has been marginalized. When the numbers participating in these unofficial web votes on issues get large enough, they will carry enormous weight with elected representatives.

On the mechanics of winning elections, Morris manages to be simultaneously sensible and self-contradictory.

He argues persuasively that money doesn't matter nearly as much as message, even in state races. Then he tries to rationalize the Clinton-Gore campaign's huge expenditure of early money in 1996, without mentioning there is thin evidence the ad buys made a difference. He proves that negative campaigning doesn't work as well as people think. Then it turns out that what he really means is that negative campaigning only works when it is especially clever.

Here, Morris makes an intriguing counter-intuitive argument. Conventional...