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"Scam" ads the norm Trail Mix: Hillary haters spam cyberspace Gunning for the center Democrats make Hillary legit The blundering pundit Don Giuliani Campaign video: |
 Dick Morris with his wife, Eileen McGann, at the Metropolitan Opera in 1997. The blundering pundit
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May 16, 2000 | NEW YORK -- Under the banner headline "Run, Rudy, Run!" Morris boldly insisted, "None of the recent flaps that have engulfed the political career and personal life of Mayor Giuliani will have any real effect on his ability to win the U.S. Senate seat from New York." Last week's uncomfortable soap opera between Rudy and his angry wife "won't cost him a quarter of 1 percentage point" come election day, Morris argued with total certainty. Pretty heady stuff. But before Giuliani staffers start faxing the reassuring column out to nervous upstate supporters, the mayor's crew should understand that although Morris has been meticulously handicapping the Hillary/Rudy race for over a year now, spilling gallons of column ink forecasting the campaign, he has gotten virtually nothing right. Ever.
Morris was wrong all last spring, summer and fall when he confidently declared Hillary would never enter the race for Senate. And now, over the last three weeks, he's been spectacularly wrong in predicting Giuliani's political future. The only thing to be said in his defense is that he's consistent. Morris, of course, is President Clinton's former advisor, the triangulation-loving political guru who was tossed overboard in 1996 after a tabloid revealed Morris' affair with a prostitute. Once dubbed by Time magazine as a "gleeful genius" and "the most influential private citizen in America," Morris now fills his time dashing off a weekly New York Post column used almost exclusively to try to win small bouts of revenge against the Clinton clan. Oh sure, from time to time Morris casts his political gaze nationally, as he did last year in cautioning readers, "It would be a serious blunder to count out Liddy Dole ... With her sterling record at the Red Cross, Elizabeth Dole could well be the first woman president." But since then, he's mostly dedicated himself to writing off Hillary's Senate chances as nonexistent. Here's a typical 1999 dispatch, one in an endless collection of botched forecasts. Morris writes gleefully: The fact she is planning to rent, not buy, a home here and her recent flip-flops on issues involving Israel aren't helping her either. She just looks more tawdry with each maneuver. Will she be able to reverse field and start moving up? Nope. No way she will do anything but lose votes even faster. Hillary is sinking fast. The bottom line: She won't run. Of course, Hillary, a proud New York homeowner, now leads or is tied with Giuliani in most of the major statewide polls. (So much for Morris' supposed mastery of polling data.) And in a neat trick, Morris often doubled not only as an anti-Hillary columnist for the Post, but as an on-the-record source, too. Appearing in the pages last year as "a longtime consultant to the Clintons," Morris, who once riffed on talk radio that Hillary was a lesbian, told a Post news reporter, "I think she is going to look at these [poll] numbers, understand they aren't moving, and pull out. The first lady is on the ropes right now."
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