I'm bringing the blog back today, and congratulations on being the only person to know about it! Obviously the layout on the sidebar sucks wookie at the moment, and I'm not too keen on these arrows all over the place, but that is all stuff that can be ironed out later.
Today, I want to talk about one man's brilliant maneuver aimed at landing himself airtime over at FOX-News for the post-election months. That man is Dick Morris. Let's not talk about all the slimy things he's done in the past, or how he's such a hack these days that the only airtime he gets is on FOX and the occasional Daily Show(at around the 3 minute mark), let's just focus on his Newsmax post. I've reproduced his electoral "projection" below.
Notice anything? It's got to be the smartest thing the guy has done in years. Arizona, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina are all going to go red. Georgia is still looking six points up for McCain, and Arkansas hasn't really been polled too much lately; however, Mr. Morris has decided that all of these places are currently up in the air for the GOP at best. Example: Arkansas. Arkansas isn't getting polled (9/22 from Rasmussen at M+9, 9/21 from ARG at M+12, and 7/16 Rasmussen with M+13 are the only polls on the state this year), yet Dick Morris has decided that it is going solidly blue. Most people just scratch their heads and wonder, some just froth over and start making jokes about toe-sucking, but I think there's more to this map. It's a set before his spike.
If the election goes like everyone looking at actual polls feels it will go, Morris has basically called a whole bunch of really safe red states either as toss-ups or in the blue column. What does that mean for Morris when they go red on election day? It means he gets to trumpet his exclusive discovery of a massive McCain comeback effort that turned multiple states back over to the GOP. Presumably, in places like South Carolina, his efforts will have been so good that he won by ten points or so. That means that Morris is getting some FOX love, since the only story they're going to have is the faux-ACORN scandal. But wait, there's more, these two stories actually complement each other. See, the GOP wants to say that Obama stole the election via ACORN, and that, without all that fradulent fraud that the Democrats are fraudulently doing, McCain's real landslide support would have shown. It must have been landslide support, because it is not business feasible to run a network that caters to a shrinking constituency, so the argument will be that somewhere on the order of G.W.Bush's 2004 numbers are still Republicans. How do they know that's true? Because just look at Dick Morris' exclusive piece on the massive McCain comeback effort of the last three weeks of the election. This man just made himself so much freaking money assuming it is still worth anything by the time FOX-News makes the argument.
