Dick Morris has become famous for always being wrong. I’d argue that part of the reason for this is that he hasn’t often attempted to be right. His prognostications and predictions have been part pep-rally (bucking up dejected troops) and part an effort at wishing-will-make-it-so. I don’t think he ever believed that Mitt Romney was going to win, but he thought telling Republicans that he might would keep them from collapsing in apathy and despair.
In any case, he’s not as stupid as he appears. And when he went to work for Bill Clinton, he gave him good advice, not from a policy point of view, but from a political point of view. Triangulation worked well for Clinton in the 1996 election cycle. It probably would have worked well going into the 2000 cycle, too, if the Lewinsky scandal hadn’t upended everything.
Obviously, he’s advising the other side now. But, in going to CPAC and telling them to stop trying to outlaw abortion and balance the budget in ten years, he’s essentially giving them the same unprincipled, cynical, yet solid political advice he gave Clinton. Even today, it’s Clinton who gets most of the credit for balancing the budget, even though the Congressional Republicans played a big role in making it happen. But the House Republicans will never get any credit for anything that Obama does because they have absolutely no authorship. In a divided government, the minority party must find ways to make common cause with the president.
As for abortion, the Democrats would really welcome the change that Morris advocates:
In order to win back young women, Morris argued that Republicans should stop trying to make abortion illegal and instead focus on a bipartisan effort to reduce the instances of abortion.
“Single white women run screaming from the Republican Party, largely because of our pro-life position,” Morris said. Morris stressed that Republicans can remain pro-life in principle, but needed to shift their focus away from the courts and embrace polices like “adoption, adoption tax incentives, birth control, abstinence, parental notification, parental support … a whole range of efforts, some sponsored by the right, some sponsored by the left.”
Overturning Roe v. Wade, he said, was “a case we’re never going to win.”
Democrats aren’t interested in abstinence programs that have been proven not to work, especially if they are a substitute for sex education. But there is a lot that the Democrats would be happy to work on with Republicans to lower the occurrence of abortion.
I don’t know if the Republicans will begin to embrace pro-choice candidates anytime soon, although it could happen in certain regions of the country. All I know is that the current iteration of the Republican Party is unstable and it is going to come apart in some hard to predict ways.
