VOTE.COM.

• Author: Taylor, Paul (American choreographer)
• Position: Review

VOTE.COM By Dick Morris Renaissance Book, $22.95

ANYONE WHO HAS EVER GOTTEN a piece of direct mail from a politician or issue group is familiar with the writing style. Enemies are ominous! Ruination is imminent! Sentences are punchy! It's a rhetorical never-never land where the exclamation point is king and nuance an outcast.

As I labored through Dick Morris' strange and fraudulent book, I kept thinking about that mode of discourse, for the political future he conjures up in cyberspace feels like a corner of hell where all the direct mail keeps being recirculated.

In Morris' overheated imaginings, candidates will soon be communicating to voters one-at-a-time in a stream of targeted emails and videos that trip through cyberspace cost-free. If it sounds like a killer app for personalized political pander, that's probably why the author--who's spent his career helping politicians perfect the art form--finds it appealing. But to anyone who thinks that campaigns ought to play out in the biggest public square, precisely so they can invite citizens to weigh self-interest against common purpose, it's a scary prospect.

It's by no means the scariest thing Morris sees in his crystal ball, however. That would be his vision of a politics in which citizens use cyberspace to talk back to their elected leaders in a daily stream of referendums. So today we'll all be voting on taxes, tomorrow on abortion, Thursday on war in the Balkans, and Friday (because democracy shouldn't always be such a bore!) on whether Bill and Hillary should split up.

Mind you, these plebiscites won't be government-run. They'll be sponsored by advertiser-supported commercial Websites like--you've probably guessed the punch line--Vote.com. That's not just the name of Morris' new book; it's also the name of his new Website. And, so Morris would have us believe, these plebiscites are the tool that will convert our representative system of government into a direct democracy.

"We are about to reclaim the power Jefferson would have given us," the author proclaims, revving up his faux populism at full throttle. "We'll still choose our president and Congress by the old election system, but the influence the public can bring to bear will make it far less important whom we elect" It will be government by applause meter.

This is a very old and very bad idea. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato observed the first stirrings of democracy in Athens and worried that leaders who rely too much on...