J$P Instant Transcript! Dick Morris joins Hannity and Colmes to talk about (who else?) Hillary Clinton.

From Hannity and Colmes, December 7 2004:

ALAN COLMES [FOX NEWS]: Joining us now the author of Because He Could and former Clinton advisor, Dick Morris. Are you going to spend the next four years blasting Hillary Clinton, going after, attacking Hillary Clinton?

DICK MORRIS: You bet I am.

COLMES: Why?

MORRIS: Well, my book Rewriting History begins that process.

COLMES: Yes, of course, right. But why, why?

MORRIS: Because she would make a terrible President. Let me get this straight, I think I can formulate it. She would combine the self-righteousness of Carter, the ethics of Nixon, the tactics of Joseph McCarthy, the partisanship of Harry Truman--

COLMES: Oh come on, Dick. Tactics of Joseph McCarthy?

MORRIS: Absolutely. What do you call those private detectives sicced on every single woman simply because they had affairs with Bill Clinton?

COLMES: Yeah, I--

MORRIS: What do you call digging up Linda Tripp's personnel file and releasing it illegally? What do you call--

COLMES: But I don't know that all those things happened as you've represented them, and furthermore, you don't know that she would be a Joseph McCarthy if she were in the White House.

MORRIS: Her chief private investigator was Terry Lenzner, someone she worked with extensively when she was in the law firm in Oakland, and in the Legal Services Corporation.

COLMES: So let me get this straight, if Hillary Clinton is President, all of our privacy rights are in danger. Our privacy as Americans--

MORRIS: You're looking at Richard Nixon but with an ultraliberal agenda. Let me put it to you this way. Bill Clinton is a moderate who is a liberal when he has to be. Hillary Clinton is a liberal who is a moderate when she has to be. And your tease is completely accurate: Hillary will be anything she needs to be to win. And what she's doing increasingly is trying to move to a red-state center. She--

COLMES: You're the one who said to Bill Clinton, triangulate, take some of their positions, move to the right--

MORRIS: It's the right thing to do. I'm not saying she's not going to win.

COLMES: --Hillary Clinton might be doing a Dick Morris by doing this.

MORRIS: Absolutely. She is. I'm not saying she's not going to win. She'll walk into the Democratic nomination and she's got a good chance of winning the White House. But look at it. She came out a few weeks ago and said she's strongly opposed to illegal immigrants. She got a seat on the House Armed Services Committee. She voted for the Gulf War resolution. She supported the Defense of Marriage Act. Hillary is going to do anything she can to position herself as a red-state kind of girl.

COLMES: But if that's what she does, and if she were to legislate that way, and if she were to govern that way as President, wouldn't that be good for the country? Because there she is finding the center where Americans actually live.

MORRIS: Ah, now we get to the part that isn't true. Bill Clinton ran that way and after two years governed that way. Hillary would not. Hillary--

COLMES: How do you know?

MORRIS: Because I know her so well. Hillary is a deeply committed, personally true believer in a liberal-left quasi-government-socialist dogma. Hillary is, Bill is a pragmatist. Bill enters politics because of his psychological needs. Hillary is in politics because she's an idealist. She just happens to be wrong.

COLMES: Then why isn't she voting that way in the Senate? Why isn't she voting--

MORRIS: Because she wants to get elected President of the United States and she knows that she's got to run to the center.

COLMES: I see.

SEAN HANNITY [FOX NEWS]: Hey Dick, basically what you're describing is a situation where this is an orchestrated campaign to lie, manipulate, bamboozle, propagandize--

MORRIS: Yep.

HANNITY: --I mean, Dick, this is what the American people, you're saying that there's not an honest bone in her body politically then, am I misreading you?

MORRIS: When Hillary says liberal things she's being honest. When she says centrist things she's being deceptive. And Hillary sometimes is a liberal, and sometimes she's a moderate. During the Kerry campaign she was moving to the left, because she saw Dean doing well and she knew that she needed to stay on top of the leftward drift of the Democratic party. Now it becomes clear that she needs to move back to the center, because the election results are in, and that's what she's doing now.

HANNITY: But core values--

MORRIS: But where Bill Clinton would migrate to the center because it was politically advisable but he would stay there, she does it just because she wants to win.

HANNITY: Because she's such a shoe-in though, Dick, as you pointed out, and I agree with you on this point, because she's such a shoe-in to get the nomination, she may not have to drift as far left as other candidates to get the nomination, which will help her.

MORRIS: Exactly. She could walk into this nomination and she knows it.

HANNITY: Well she could walk into it--

MORRIS: And that's why she's going to spend four years positioning herself as a centrist, and I intend to spend four years calling her on it, much to Alan's dismay over there.

HANNITY: No, and I'm going to spend four years cheering you on, because I think--

MORRIS: By the way, Sean, that illegal immigrant driver's license thing, that was my proposal. I made it in 1995 and Hillary and Bill vetoed it because they were worried about the impact on the Hispanic base.

HANNITY: The question I want to ask you though--

MORRIS: Congresswoman Lee was totally wrong. They came in legally, the 9/11 hijackers, but they stayed here illegally.

HANNITY: That's correct.

MORRIS: Half of our illegal immigrants overstay their visas--

HANNITY: That's a big problem. Absolutely.

MORRIS: --and the only way to catch them is when we find out that they don't have a driver's license, because we have no other method of catching them.

HANNITY: Can Hillary pull this off is the next question, because I'm not so sure. I think there's a certain percentage of the population that perhaps they're not as engaged in the political world as we are. They're busy making America great, going about their daily lives, raising their children. I mean, is it possible that she is going to be able to convince, manipulate, and pull this off?

MORRIS: It sure is, Sean. Look, 54% of John Kerry's vote came from the 34% of the population that are black, Hispanic, or single women. Hillary will draw much better among single women, much higher turnout among blacks, and better among Hispanics than Kerry did. So those three elements would give her a five or six point edge, and Kerry lost by only three.

HANNITY: But won't she energize the conservatives?

MORRIS: Now of course single white men and married white women will come out more formidably and that will help conservatives. But this is going to be a very difficult election. That's one of the reasons why I'm pushing Condoleeza Rice as the Republican candidate.

COLMES: All right Dick. I'm guessing you're not on the Clinton Christmas card list this year.

MORRIS: I am, but when I get it there's a white powder on the outside of the envelope.

COLMES: Aw, that's not nice.