Fox News political analyst Dick Morris, who repeatedly predicted a “landslide” victory for Mitt Romney, is officially “through” according to the standard set by Bill O'Reilly earlier this year.
During a May appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly told Morris that he was “so far out on the limb” for a Romney win, that if Obama was re-elected, Morris would be“through” and would be “selling refrigerators in Topeka.”
Major media outlets, including Fox News, are now projecting that Obama will win re-election.
In February, Morris appeared on Hannity and declared that there was “no chance that Obama will get re-elected.” When Hannity disagreed, Morris said “zilch, zone, zip nada,” prompting Hannity to tell Morris that he would hold the analyst to his prediction.
Morris had been publicly bullish on Romney's chances for months, including repeatedly during the past week.
Despite ample polling evidence to the contrary, Morris published a column predicting a big Romney win in The Hill last week with the headline, “Here comes the landslide.” Yesterday on Fox News' America Live, Morris similarly predicted “Romney will win by a very large margin -- a landslide if you will.”
Claiming that all of the polls were wrong, Morris declared that Romney would win 325 electoral votes and carry the popular vote by “more than 5 points.” According to Morris, Romney was poised to win states like Pennsylvania, Colorado, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
None of these things happened.
Morris' touting of Romney this election cycle is more cynical than his usually awful political prognostication. Last year, Morris told radio host Mike Gallagher that he had stopped “dumping on” Romney -- even though he was concerned by the candidate's “flip flops” and his passage of health care reform -- because Morris didn't want to make the candidate's job of defeating Obama more difficult. Morris subsequently sang Romney's praises during media appearances, and in recent weeks has tied his lofty predictions of a Romney victory to fundraising pitches for his Super PAC for America.
During an appearance earlier this week on Fox & Friends, Morris announced that after the election, “either I'm gonna have to go through a big reckoning, or they are. And you know what? They are.”
Now that Morris has completely whiffed on the presidential election, will Fox figures actually hold him accountable, or will they keep trotting him out as an “expert” to tell their viewers what they want to hear?