Dick Morris In Exile

Dick Morris punched his ticket for Philadelphia in the week leading up to the presidential election. Most pundits expected a close finish. A good number predicted a thin victory for the President. Some, like the New York Times’s Nate Silver, foresaw an easy Obama win.

But not Dick. He’d been at the head of the GOP’s blithely delusional brigade all year long. The eve of the election was no time to quit. While others equivocated, Morris doubled down.

“We’re going to win by a landslide,” he said to Fox News’s Greta van Susteren, with a grin that seemed to stretch a foot wide. “It would be the biggest surprise in recent political history.” Up flashed an electoral map covered in Romney red. Morris proceeded to jump through a series of contorted logical hoops, citing the skewing of one poll and the unjust tweaking of another survey, and finished by predicting his candidate would not just take the battlegrounds of Florida, Virginia and Ohio, but would best Obama in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, New Hampshire and, yes, even Pennsylvania.

And then, the vote. Overnight, Morris became a national laughingstock. He was “a joke to every smart conservative in Washington and most every smart conservative under the age of 40,” Ross Douthat told Politico. He was the “king of wrong mountain,” said Jon Stewart.

Morris had, of course, long been reviled by many Democrats for selling out his old boss, Bill Clinton, but now he was suddenly persona non grata among respectable Republicans, too. GOP opinion-makers turned on him like he was a quack selling miracle tonic.

“I got to tell you something, people are furious with you right now,” Sean Hannity told Morris on Fox after the election.

That was among his last appearances on the network. After logging almost 15 years and some 3,000 interviews as a paid Fox contributor, Morris had been blacklisted. Fox made it formal in February, when it declined to renew his contract. It was a rare instance of actual accountability in the typically consequence-free world of political punditry. Dick Morris was so full of bullshit that even Fox was embarrassed to have him.

But not, apparently, Philadelphia.

Each weekday afternoon, from 2 to 6 p.m., Morris can now be heard on WPHT 1210’s afternoon call-in show, replacing Michael Smerconish, who jumped to satellite radio in mid-April.

As tempting as it is to dismiss Morris as a sideshow, that would be a mistake. Despite his spectacular flop last fall, Morris has an instinctual understanding of politics that shouldn’t be underestimated, particularly in a city with relatively few veterans of the Washington game. And Morris—unlike so many of the leading national blowhards—was once a political consultant of genuine consequence. Indeed, he arguably had as much to do with the nature of our national political culture—such as it is—as any consultant alive.

What’s more, there’s no indication Morris is just using WPHT as a pit stop. His eventual ambition is to build a syndicated empire, headquartered here in Philadelphia. And he is spending a surprisingly large chunk of airtime on thoroughly local affairs, from municipal tax policy to allegations of anti-Semitism on the Evesham school board.

Make no mistake: Dick Morris—a man ejected from the ranks of the national punditocracy as a charlatan and opportunistic say-anything hack—is attempting to inject himself into the already sordid world of Philadelphia politics. This could go one of two ways. Morris has the potential to emerge as a sharp, uncensored observer in a city with a circumspect civic dialogue—the leading local voice of the angry right, tipping over sacred political cows in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. Or Morris could continue prancing down the path of glib, credibility-shattering commentary.

Either way, Morris’s fate as a public figure now looks to be in the hands of Philadelphia and its suburbs. Which, yes, sounds absurd, but no more absurd than anything else in Dick Morris’s life.