Worst Pundit In America: Dick Morris (In A Landslide)

As bad as the political pundits were during the 2008 presidential race, I'm not sure that anyone can match the consistently dismal performance by Republican mouthpiece Dick Morris.

Time after time, Morris' predictions were not just flat out wrong, but they showed the staggering depth of his inability to understand the American public and how unfolding events were being received and digested. Rarely did a week go by during the general election that Morris predicted the 180-degree opposite of what would eventually transpire. It was astounding for its consistency.

Below are some nuggets that I pulled from Morris' regular column in The Hill.

But before you read them, I want to point out his latest prediction about President Obama in his most recent column, titled "The Obama presidency: Here comes socialism":

"Obama’s name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power."

Got that? Morris predicts an Obama collapse and a GOP renewal.

Okay, now read how accurate he was during the 2008 presidential race:

• Oct 28: Undecideds Should Break For McCain: "As Obama has oscillated, moving somewhat above or somewhat below 50 percent in all the October polls, his election likely hangs in the balance. If he falls short of 50 percent in these circumstances, a majority of the voters can be said to have rejected him. Likely a disproportionate number of the undecideds will vote for McCain."



• Oct 21: The Populism Divide: "Then came Obama’s conversation with Joe the Plumber, possibly the decisive moment in the election."



• Oct 14: The Nuts At ACORN Could Cause Obama’s Fall: "At the very least, the negative publicity ACORN will attract will paint Obama as a radical with questionable judgment. At the most, it might cause voters to wonder if he is not himself involved in electoral fraud."



• Sep 16: Candidate and Party: The Obama Deficit: "How odd that Obama, with a world-class personality and an incredibly charismatic speaking style, should be losing the mano-a-mano contest to McCain, who is 25 years older and a foot shorter. But McCain has opened up a decisive lead over Obama, actually using the Democrat’s articulateness against him."



• Sep 9: Obama vs. Obama: "Now that McCain has definitively, and I suspect irreversibly, separated himself from Bush, he has become an acceptable alternative to Obama for voters seeking change...Obama was wrong to invest so much in the Bush-McCain linkage...The Obama campaign doesn’t seem to get that it is running against McCain, not Sarah Palin. They spent the entire Republican convention and the week since attacking the vice presidential candidate. That’s like stabbing the capillaries instead of the arteries. Nobody is going to vote for or against McCain because they want Sarah Palin to be vice president of the United States, or don’t."



• Sep 3: Dems Pounce Too Soon: "If Palin emerges from her [convention] speech in good shape, the Democrats will be falling all over themselves trying to explain to alienated women why they attacked her on such personal issues, blaming her for her sister’s messy divorce, her daughter’s pregnancy and her husband’s DWI of 20 years ago. Women — and men — will be impressed that Palin is the kind of anti-Washington establishment candidate for whom they are yearning. She’ll explain what she did in Alaska and what she’ll do to the power elite in Washington. Her integrity, courage and commitment are going to shine through."



• Sep 2: Stick With Sarah, Who Engenders Empathy, Inspiration: "Sarah Palin’s selection will end up as a big win for John McCain. ...The attacks on Palin mirror the problems that tens of millions of American women find in their everyday lives. To attack them would be to condemn themselves and their own choices in their own lives. Watching Palin standing strong and McCain backing her up will be inspiring to many of them. And the identification of the Democrats with the attacks on her will turn them off...The Republicans, McCain and Palin, will come through this crisis in great shape."



• Sep 1: Palin Pick Hurts Obama Bounce: "The young governor has yet to prove herself in the hurly-burly of a national campaign, but the early indications are that her story, as well as her beliefs, will have broad appeal in this unsettled year."



• Aug 26: The Better Hillary Does, The Worse For Obama: "By not putting Hillary on his ticket and then giving her a primetime speech at the convention on Tuesday, Obama has the worst of both possible worlds. The better Hillary’s speech, the more people ask why she was passed over for vice president...He didn’t help himself with these women by not choosing Hillary. Now, when Hillary spends all of Tuesday night showing what a grievous omission leaving her off the ticket really was, the electoral consequences for Obama are likely to be horrific."



• Aug 5: Bad Economy May Hurt Obama: "It almost doesn’t matter that McCain is not an economist and avows ignorance of what Thomas Carlyle called the “dismal science.” We know McCain. We know he will surround himself with some pretty capable people. And, above all, we know that he won’t raise taxes. Were these calmer times, with less of a threat from abroad and less economic danger, we might indulge our penchant for change and elect a neophyte in the hope that he will offer something different."



• Jul 29: Obama’s Women Problem: "But a bigger problem may be a cultural alienation older white women feel toward Obama. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright may linger as a worry in their increasingly gray heads as they contemplate an Obama presidency. This fear of the unknown and the gap they seem to feel with Obama is so strong that it is overcoming their normal proclivity to back Democrats...Of course, McCain is a uniquely attractive candidate to the Democratic and independent base. Long regarded as a maverick Republican, he attracts these swing voters and is ideally positioned to exploit the estrangement between older women and Barack Obama."



• Jul 8: Obama Would, In Fact, Govern From The Left: "Even if Obama means what he is saying as he moves to the center trying to win the general election, the fact is that he will be forced to move very far to the left should he become president, forced by the liberals in his own party...Obama will not be able to help himself. The Democratic majority in Congress won’t settle for triangulation. They will make the Obama of November into a liar and the Obama of the primaries into an honest man."



• Apr 8: Obama’s Weakness Is Weakness: "McCain can use the predisposition of voters to see Obama as weak, coupled with the Iraq issue, to make the strength issue his key advantage."



• Jan 23: How Clinton Will Win The Nomination By Losing S.C.: "Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race — and Obama ultimately loses."



• Dec 5, 2007: Hillary, Rudy May Know Life After Death: "There is only one way for Hillary to shift the focus onto Obama or John Edwards: lose. By losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, she makes the key question not her veracity but Obama’s or Edwards’s ability to win. Democrats are going to be reluctant to nominate someone they know so little about as Obama and will wonder if the nation is ready for an African-American candidate (it is) or for a man who has been senator for 104 weeks before running for president (it’s not)...But recover they both [Clinton and Giuliani] likely will. Remember how Gary Hart beat Mondale in New Hampshire in 1984 and Mondale came back to win? And how Paul Tsongas beat Clinton there in 1992 and Clinton eventually won? And how McCain defeated Bush in New Hampshire in 2000 but how Bush came back to win? Different year. New candidates. Same deal.

• Feb 7, 2007: Hillary and Rudy Could Wrap It Up This Year: "The nominees for the 2008 presidential race will be selected in 2007. The tempo of the new political process, driven by 24-hour cable news, Internet bloggers, conservative talk radio, and liberal NPR is so rapid that the nomination race cannot exist in stasis waiting for Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina to get around to holding their votes in early 2008. Well before they open their caucuses or polling places, this nomination, in each party, will have been decided by the national media coverage during 2007...Right now, neither Rudy nor Hillary has a front-runner’s lock, but they are clearly the man and woman to beat in their respective parties. If they hold their leads through Labor Day, my bet is that it will be all over."

One last thing...On Morris' website, he tried predicting the final electoral vote landslide that McCain was about to experience in the final week of the race. Even there he was an abysmal failure. While he predicted an Obama landslide, he predicted that Arkansas was leaning Obama and that Tennessee and Louisiana were toss-ups.

You might recall that the three states where Obama fared significantly more poorly than John Kerry in 2004 were none other than Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. In fact, Obama lost AR by 20, LA by 19, and TN by 15.

Dick Morris: Worst Political Pundit In America...in a landslide.

Mark Nickolas is the Managing Editor of Political Base, and this story was from his original post, "Worst Pundit In America: Dick Morris."