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.
Yes, he gave his comments at CPAC in a room with “at least 50 people” –doesn’t sound to me like many GOPers are listening to his message.
I think we need one or two Congressional elections in which crazy does not win in deep-red districts for the GOP to come to its senses.
I read at TPM that CPAC is big into ‘we love immigrants’ this year, too.
I don’t know how accurately this reflects the House, but I found this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Majority_for_Choice
2 pro-choice Republican Senators, from Illinois and Maine.
6 pro-choice Republican Representatives, down from 9 five years ago.
Women aren’t running from them because they are pro-life. Who is anti-life? They are running because the GOP considers women as mindless brood mares whose every sexual and procreative aspect is under male control with physical penalties (i.e. vaginal ultrasound) as punishment for transgression. Very much like the Taliban (or the Catholic hierarchy). When will the GOP start demanding that women cover their faces, wrists, and ankles?
This would be good advice, if the GOP was at all interested in reducing the number of abortions. But they’re not. To do so would take away one of their few remaining ways to influence voters, and wouldn’t properly punish women for wanting control of their own lives. No, the GOP is going to hold onto this one until it drowns them.
This presupposes that the objective is to accomplish some of your goals, but if your single goal is to kill the baby and the president’s goal is to raise the baby to be strong and productive then it’s going to be impossible to achieve your goal so long as you cannot dictate the outcome. In that instance your short-term objective is to weaken the baby or, at a minimum, keep the baby from growing strong and knowledgeable so that when the time come when you can dictate the outcome the baby is fairly easy to kill.
The bathtub awaits…