Friday night on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow answered a letter from Dick Morris’ lawyer demanding a correction to an earlier segment. Maddow was more than happy to address the issue, and issued a few corrections of her own.
The segment began with a short history lesson with regards to Democratic presidents. In the last 100 years, there have been only 3 Democratic presidents who were elected to second terms, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Pres. Bill Clinton and Pres. Barack Obama. And while history has sort of rewritten the 1996 election as a shoo-in for Clinton, there were some fairly harrowing moments along the way.
On the day in 1996 that the president was to give his acceptance speech as the nominee to the Democratic convention, one of his top advisors, Dick Morris, was the subject of a tabloid scandal that alleged that Morris had an ongoing relationship with a prostitute, and that he had allowed her to listen in on conversations he had with the president. Morris, the campaign’s chief political strategist, was forced to resign.
“Now, we sort of think of Dick Morris as this guy on Fox News,” Maddow said, “He’s sort of part of the pundit-sphere. But at the time, when he was all but ruining the re-election campaign that he was supposedly helping to manage, he was a really big deal.”
“It was just a blockbuster, humiliating political fall in the middle of the president’s re-election campaign,” she said. ”And that is how Dick Morris became a famous person.”
Morris has gone on the become a far-right conservative who “writes books about how sleazy the Clintons are,” Maddow said, “which is ironic.”
