Dick Morris has offered his advice on the presidential campaign once again with a dramatic red-blue map showing Obama beating McCain by almost 100 electoral votes. His advice to the McCain campaign seems entirely myopic and hyperbolic at the same time, which is often true when someone tries to create wisdom from simple-minded statistical analysis. I agree with Morris that the Palin bounce is over, but only for now. The Palin essence has a lot more muscle left that hasn’t been tapped, could have been, and should be.

Morris focuses on the economy. The two candidates have been about even on this issue, with McCain leading at times. This is extremely good for a member of the same party as the president, who is traditionally blamed for economic problems. Democrats have played on that for many months to far less effect than political historians would have guessed. In recent polls, the context of Dick Morris’ analysis, McCain has suffered a bit from doomsday talk related to the collapse of a few financial giants. That gave Obama a bounce on the economy.

Morris projects all the way to the debates, offering what does not seem to be terrible advice for handling a single question. “McCain needs to attack Obama over his tax program and move the discussion away from who is at fault for the economic mess.” OK, but I don’t think that’s new. “McCain can use the current state of the markets to appeal to Obama to forgo his capital gains tax increase in order to encourage the flow of capital into the markets.” Not new either, but probably good enough for Dick Morris’ economy.

John McCain was behind before the Republican Convention. With the convention bounce gone, the obvious question is how will John McCain saying the things that John McCain said before result in his victory? The obvious answer is, it won’t. McCain on the economy has already been tested. It’s good but the weight of being Republican at this point puts limits on its effect. Of course he needs to remain good on the economy but that in itself does not provide a winning formula.

It is useful at this point to explain a political idea known as “triangulation,” which is attributed to Dick Morris. When you have the sense that the two parties are now having greater difficulty appearing different from one another, that the United States is no longer a working democracy, that the more they talk about fixing things the worse they get, that’s triangulation. Triangulation is the term Dick Morris used for eliminating perspective and judgment from politics, eliminating pesky old right-left political ideology, and running all politics based on Dick Morris’ polling. Free from any actual competition of ideas, campaigns can focus entirely manipulating beliefs – i.e. lying to voters based on polls in a process entirely separate and distinct from any actual political decision.

Morris’ tutorial example is “welfare reform,” first promoted in the Reagan years as a plan for reducing welfare dependency and taxpayer burden. Adopted by the Clinton campaign with the slogan “end welfare as we know it,” it ultimately produced a dramatic expansion of the welfare system. Aside from ever increasing cost, it broke the constitutionally based “means-tested” barrier. For the first time in history the federal government went beyond aid to the poor to take control of family law and its related context of civil law and civil rights collapsed. (Family law has been legally reclassified as “social policy.”)

With both parties effectively on the same team, nobody told the press about the damage being done. Out of control pork-barreling was met with “public-private partnerships” that allowed large amounts of money to slip unquestioned into a milky abyss. The myth of welfare reform based on conservative values remained while a new system of bipartisan corruption flourished. In effect, a one-party system replaced the old and cranky but seemingly adequate two-party system. The factions compete for power but not for ideology, and in this new America, there was no room for at least one large voter bloc composed of citizens who could lose everything in the political manipulations that followed the collapse of civil law. They would become the poltiically produced lost Americans; stripped of civil rights, characterized as deadbeats and criminals, abused, thrown in jail, and then forgotten.

It’s no wonder then that Dick Morris shrugs off the Palin factor as being no more than a convention bounce. It wasn’t merely the claim that Sarah Palin fought corruption in Alaska and would clean things up in Washington that got people excited. Anyone could say that. She instantly represented a clean break from the PC ideology of the single-party system. Her very existence on stage suggested that voters would have a choice and a chance to emerge from the Morris-era political toilet.

The secret formula for a McCain victory is to bring the Palin essence into the campaign as more than just a highly successful convention speech. Fight the culture war. Give us a democratic choice. The bounce will return as a solid lead. Find the lost Americans with a promise to return to constitutionally based civil law, something the conservative base, the middle, and even many on the left actually favor, and they will surely vote overwhelmingly in his favor. Simply put, take the idea, the image, the feeling that produced the Sarah Palin bounce, take the Palin essence and turn it into real political promise.

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