Dick Morris’s Fox Exit Latest Fall—and Rise?—of a Political Survivor

by Matt Taylor Feb 7, 2013 4:45 AM EST

Fox has cast out the Clinton adviser turned GOP pundit over his epic Romney fail. But the wily political operator has been down before, says Matt Taylor, and his latest self-renovation—which he previewed on CNN—may well work again.

That Fox News has dropped conservative commentator Dick Morris from his perch as a regular on-air presence caps a slow-but-steady fall from grace for the man whose raw political instincts were once the stuff of legend.

Long credited with steering President Bill Clinton toward the moderate, triangulating course that won him a second term in 1996 (just two years after Democrats took a historic beating in midterm elections), Morris stubbornly predicted a Mitt Romney landslide right up until Election Day this November, the polls be damned. But unlike Karl Rove, whose contract with the conservative network was renewed despite a bona fide on-air meltdown, Morris got the ax.

Which may speak less to his fatally flawed election handicapping and more to shady business practices like selling ads on his website to campaigns he discussed on the air, super-PAC fundraising that lined his own pockets, and the auction of a tour of Fox News’s studio at a local Republican Party fundraiser in Florida (for which he was reprimanded by network brass).

Before he was a wannabe conservative media tycoon, though, Morris was a Democrat. He got his start at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School in the early 1960s, when he managed eventual Manhattan Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s bid for class president. Back then Morris was far from the conservative firebrand we know today. One acquaintance recounted with amusement when Morris’s father had told him that a young Dick canvassed on behalf of the doomed presidential candidacy of liberal favorite Adlai Stevenson.

more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/07/dick-morris-s-fox-exit-latest-fall-and-rise-of-a-political-survivor.html