J$P Instant Transcript! Dick Morris explains why Bush will win.

From Hannity and Colmes, October 27 2004:

ALAN COLMES [FOX NEWS]: Joining us now the author of Because He Could and former Clinton advisor, Dick Morris. Dick, how are you doing?

DICK MORRIS [FOX NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST]: Hey, Alan, good to be here.

COLMES: Who are you calling this race for?

MORRIS: Bush.

COLMES: Why?

MORRIS: Because I think Kerry--well, first, I think in general he’s been ahead. But Kerry made a big mistake two days ago, a big mistake. He had it right over the weekend, when he was focusing on domestic issues. He said on Saturday in Pueblo, Colorado, all the President talks about is the war on terror. We need someone who can talk about social security and the economy and healthcare and so on. Then, when this target of opportunity came up with these missing explosives, he rushed right in, tactically, and invested his whole campaign in it. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, he predicated his candidacy based on what happened in a jungle 35 years ago in VietNam and nobody will ever know. And now he’s predicated his last week based on what happened in a desert ammunition dump in Iraq, nobody will ever know.

COLMES: That’s not true, he’s talked about the economy as well.

MORRIS: Even if he’s right, even if those explosives did disappear on our watch, even if he’s right, even if the Times and CBS is right, he is not going to succeed in persuading the American people he’s a better Commander in Chief in Iraq. He’s lost that for 5 months, he’s not going to win it in the last week.

COLMES: But Dick, he has not only, he’s not only talking about that. He’s not only talking about that. Also, that we have polls out today showing it narrowing. Washington Post polls Kerry moving up, now 50-48. We see some of the swing states, he’s doing better in some of the swing states than he is nationally.

MORRIS: There is an inevitable Democratic trend in the closing week, at which a Democrat inevitably closes on a Republican because downscale voters begin paying attention. And if Kerry had simply ridden that trend, focusing on domestic issues, he might have had a shot to win. But by running that ad, investing everything in this explosives issue, making it the issue in the campaign, which is what he’s doing, he is making one last futile attempt at Bush’s strong point. He should be attacking Bush’s weak point. And now, with this being the issue that’ll dominate, and did they have the evidence, and was the Times biased, and was CBS planning a last minute hit, and was this like the National Guard story, he’s shown an unerring instinct for quicksand.

COLMES: All right, but I don’t agree that he is putting all his efforts into this one issue and talking only about this.

MORRIS: It’s all you’re talking about. It’s all the shows are talking about. It’s what his ads are all about.

COLMES: Well, that’s not all he’s talking about. Those people in swing states who are seeing John Kerry are seeing a much broader perspective, and he’s talking a lot about domestic issues to the audiences he needs to address right now.

MORRIS: Yeah, but listen. Hey Alan, how much time in the first half-hour of this show did you spend talking about the economy and how much time did you spend talking about Iraq and terror? Zero and 30?

COLMES: Well I’d like to think this show is the only thing that counts, but there are other venues where Kerry’s going to speak.

MORRIS: No, they’re all talking about it. It’s what everybody’s covering. Listen, ask yourself this question. What are people talking about in the closing week? Healthcare or Iraq? The economy or terror? They’re talking about terror and Iraq. And Kerry loses on those issues. It’s stupid.

COLMES: All right, you praise in your last column the “wolf” ad that Bush put out--

MORRIS: It’s a wonderful ad.

COLMES: --that you know is a negative, and does Bush have to go negative to win?

MORRIS: Yeah, both candidates do. It’s a comparative race, and it’s a close race. But Kerry and the Wolf, like Peter and the Wolf, that ad so illustrates the danger we’re facing and the need to focus on it, and Kerry is falling into the trap. You know, Alan, he may have a plan for America, but he’s got no clue as to how to win this election.

SEAN HANNITY [FOX NEWS]: Let me ask you this, because I think it goes a little bit deeper, Dick, and I guess I have a level of frustration I can barely express here. And that is, there’s no proof of this.

MORRIS: Yeah.

HANNITY: And here’s the problem I have, Dick. He’s a Presidential candidate. We’re talking about troops.

MORRIS: Yeah. Right.

HANNITY: His initial instinct is to race and undermine them, and now it appears that he has egg on his face. In other words, the weapons weren’t there.

MORRIS: And CBS would have done it 48 hours before the election. Let’s go back in time, Sean. In 1992, Bush tied with Clinton five days out, and the only reason Clinton won was Independent Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh--

HANNITY: Lawrence Walsh, right.

MORRIS: --said he was going to indict Weinberger, which he never did. Clinton surged five points in five days.

HANNITY: Yeah.

MORRIS: The year 2000, Gore was four or five points behind Bush in every poll. Then the DWI surfaced that he must have done, and Gore surged and he beat Bush by half a point in the popular vote. This was an attempt to do the same kind of dirty, last minute trick, but it failed.

HANNITY: All right, but the foundation I see, it is dirty tricks, this is what I see about John Kerry’s campaign. It’s based on a foundation of known falsehoods. There is no draft, but yet he repeats it. There is no effort to suppress black votes, but he’s running on it. There is no January surprise on social security, and now it appears there are no weapons that were there that it was a great blunder that we didn’t guard.

MORRIS: And by the way, it also raises the question of what happened to the WMDs, and were those spirited away at the same time to some place in Syria.

HANNITY: But is he becoming a caricature of himself, inasmuch as like he’s almost becoming Howard Dean-like to me.

MORRIS: He looks desperate. He’s lunging. I mean, his people are sitting there and they seized on this as a target of opportunity. You need to win with strategy, not with tactics. You need a plan for the last week.

HANNITY: How bad will this backfire? Now that we have a private that we just had on this program--

MORRIS: It’s going to explode in his face. It’s going to explode in his face just like the National Guard exploded in his face in early September.

HANNITY: So as people become aware now in the final days that John Kerry, and he seems to be locking himself in deeper every day--

MORRIS: Right.

HANNITY: --when people become aware those weapons weren’t there to guard, he’s going to look pretty silly.

MORRIS: More than silly, it’s going to be a national scandal. You’re talking about the most prestigious newspaper in the United States, and one of the three television networks almost deliberately misleading voters in a last minute shot. And trying to do it on CBS’s part 48 hours before an election--

HANNITY: And he is a Presidential candidate--

MORRIS: --based on what will increasingly come to be most likely a lie, and jumped on by a Presidential candidate? This is a scandal that Kerry gave himself. He could have let the Times run with it, and CBS run with it, and talk about other stuff. When he ran that ad, he sealed his fate.

HANNITY: You mean this is it, this is the big mistake here in the final week of the campaign?

MORRIS: This is it. This is it. He zigged when he should have zagged. He should have kept his mouth shut and let the New York Times and CBS fight the fight for him, and talked about everything else but. Instead he charged right in with that ad.

HANNITY: I agree with you.

MORRIS: It’s stupid. You know those guys Lockhart and McCurry? I tried to train them, but what can you do?

COLMES: Dick, I’m shocked to hear you say a negative thing about John Kerry. It shocks me Dick, but thank you for being with us.