Dick Morris’s removal from the Fox News pantheon, on account of gross electoral wrongness, means he is auditioning at CNN, and thus, reports Jillian Kay Melchior, Morris is unveiling the last turn in his own brand: He is reinventing himself as a Republican moderate:
>The author, with Eileen McGann, of books such as Here Come the Black Helicopters!,Screwed!, and Revolt!, Morris says that he’s now fighting to do for the Republican party what he did for the Democrats during the Clinton years — moderate it.
“I’m trying to explore ways in which the Republican party can make itself viable nationally, so it can win national elections without sacrificing its basic principles,” he says. “That’s the mission I’ve set for myself.”
It’s probably a better way to get airtime on CNN. It’s also a logical persona for a huckster who is quickly running short on them. Morris burst onto the national scene as a grotesquely amoral centrist consultant to the Clinton administration in the nineties, before leaving in disgrace and returning as a raving Republican lunatic bilking the conservative faithful. The new Morris has a chance to present himself, perhaps, as a David Gergen–esque Beltway hand — a chastened political operative longing for the return of good old-fashioned common sense and comity between the two parties. No more black helicopters but, perhaps, gray ones.
