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FLASHBACK: Decades of Lib Media Fawning Over Democratic Veeps
Any day now, we’ll learn who Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen as her 2024 running mate. But there’s no suspense about how the media will react, since liberal journalists have consistently praised and promoted every Democratic vice presidential nominee since the early 1990s.
One constant feature of the media’s fawning coverage has been to insist that all of these candidates — even the most left-wing nominees — are actually “moderate,” or even “conservative.” CBS’s Richard Threlkeld, for example, claimed after Senator Al Gore’s selection in 1992 that “both Gore and [Bill] Clinton are centrist, some would say conservative, Democrats...” Yet in the last full legislative year before Gore was selected (1991), he received an approval rating of just 14% from the American Conservative Union (ACU); that fell to zero in 1992.
CNN’s Candy Crowley sang the same song in 2004, when Senator John Kerry tapped North Carolina Senator John Edwards to join his ticket: “It is good old-fashioned ticket balance: a Northeastern Democrat on the liberal side, a Southern Democrat on the moderate side.” Yet, similar to Gore 12 years earlier, Edwards’s ACU rating in 2003 was just 13%, and it dropped to zero in 2004.
And just four years ago, CBS’s Anthony Mason attempted to brand the ultra-liberal Kamala Harris as a “conservative choice” for VP. Mason tossed this softball to Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett: “What does it say to you about the state of the Democratic Party that the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and from India was kind of the conservative choice here?” The ACU assigned Harris a score of zero in 2019, and just 9% in 2020.
It’s not just lying about their liberalism. In the media’s telling of the story, Democratic nominees are “smart,” “sexy,” super-popular, regular guys, who will mop the floor with their GOP counterparts. (Earlier, we detailed how Republican VP candidates are routinely derided as too conservative, too mean-spirited, too unqualified, too religious, too extreme, and/or too dumb.)
It’s an in-kind contribution that the media elite faithfully offer up each and every election year. Here’s a sample of how the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominees were covered by the press after they were selected:
AL GORE, 1992 & 1996
■ “Even liberal Democrats now...think that Al Gore and Bill Clinton could be a winning ticket. They’re willing to swallow the problems that they have with such a conservative pair in hopes of winning.”— CBS reporter Susan Spencer, July 13, 1992 convention coverage.
■ “One of the biggest advantages in choosing Gore as a political partner is the Senator’s track record on the environment. He is a best-selling author on the subject. It’s a track record the White House tries to paint as extremist. But Gore has already received the endorsement as an outstanding choice by the Sierra Club and other powerful conservation groups.”— ABC reporter Jim Hickey, July 10, 1992 Good Morning America.
■ “I was struck by the expanse of their chests. They may have to put out their stats.”— Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on Clinton and Gore, CNN’s Inside Politics, July 10, 1992.
■ “Though Al Gore relishes politics almost as much as his boss does, tonight he is next door in the Old Executive Office Building, doing what he really loves: thinking about complexity theory, open systems, Goethe and the absence of scientific metaphors in modern society. He’s writing a speech, and the elegant Ceremonial Office is strewn with pizza cartons and Diet Coke cans...Clinton may lead the country into the millennium, but it is Gore who truly embodies the new century’s possibilities and anxieties.”— Newsweek reporter Bill Turque, September 2, 1996.
JOE LIEBERMAN, 2000
■ “Lieberman is noted for his moderate voting record and high moral standards.”— CBS Evening News fill-in anchor Steve Kroft, August 7, 2000.
■ “Lieberman is a true centrist, a moderate who can build coalitions. You know how the Republicans in Philadelphia kept trying to show how moderate they were? Well, this trumps anything the Republicans had to say.”— CNN analyst Bill Schneider, August 7, 2000 Inside Politics.
■ “He’s known as a moderate Democrat, who had demonstrated fiscal conservatism in the Senate and a kind of hawkishness in foreign policy.”— ABC correspondent Terry Moran on the August 7, 2000 Good Morning America.
■ “This is the most conservative Democratic ticket in at least 50 years.”— CNN political analyst William Schneider, August 15, 2000.
Reality Check: Americans for Democratic Action had assigned Lieberman a near-perfect 95% liberal rating for the previous year (1999), while the American Conservative Union gave him a zero percent conservative score.
JOHN EDWARDS, 2004
■ “Edwards’s ingratiating incandescence has already brightened Kerry. The two became a buddy-buddy act, hugging and whispering like Starsky and Hutch after consuming the evidence.”— Newsweek’s Howard Fineman and Richard Wolffe as part of a July 19, 2004 cover package on Kerry and Edwards headlined “The Sunshine Boys?”
■ “A passionate speaker and a prolific fund-raiser, the campaign hopes the 51-year-old North Carolinian’s ‘I’m the son of a mill worker’ message will connect with working class voters in battleground states. With a style as syrupy as Carolina sweet tea, Edwards could also help in the South. He’s a proven vote-getter in South Carolina, the state where he was born and won the February primary.”— Byron Pitts on the July 6, 2004 CBS Evening News.
■ “Somewhere along the way, the redneck son of a mill worker from rural North Carolina morphed into an almost-perfect candidate....The America that Edwards dreams of is a place where there’s no crime, no poverty and no pushing. That place, of course, just happens to be John Kerry’s America....It’s as if Edwards’s main message is his positivity. He loves the crowd, and the crowd loves him. He smiles at the crowd, and they smile at him. He speaks to the crowd, and they speak to him.”— Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe in a “Web-exclusive commentary” posted on his magazine’s Web site July 14, 2004.
JOE BIDEN, 2008 & 2012
■ “At 65, Joe Biden brings a wealth of experience into the equation. Obama was only 11-years-old when Biden was first elected senator, and he’s carved out a long record of accomplishment, especially on foreign policy.— Correspondent Dean Reynolds on CBS’s Early Show, August 25, 2008.
■ “The international experience comes from a fervor to do good and to come to a consensus and present America’s best foot forward....That’s a very powerful combination. If you’ve got a Vice President who looks like he can do something and doesn’t want anything more than to see it done, that seems to be a pretty good starting point.— Keith Olbermann during MSNBC’s live coverage of Biden’s selection, August 23, 2008.
■ “Pundits talk about Biden’s foreign policy experience, his ability to attack Republicans and the strength he brings in a key battleground state like Pennsylvania. But for the Amtrak Senator, it’s about working people he feels a part of....”— MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle profiling Biden on the Today show, August 27, 2008.
■ “He’s No. 2 on the ticket but No. 1 in their hearts. Women born before the baby boom generation seem to have a collective crush on a handsome vice presidential candidate with piercing blue eyes and a wide smile who likes to talk about government benefits for seniors. No, not Paul Ryan. Joe Biden’s bringing sexy back....”— Politico’s Jonathan Allen in an October 2, 2012 story posted to his newspaper’s Web site, “Joe Biden, Sex Symbol?”
TIM KAINE, 2016
■ Co-host Joe Scarborough: “I think Tim Kaine is about as good of a choice – ”Co-host Mika Brzezinski: “He’s awesome.”
Scarborough: “ – as Hillary Clinton could have made....I think it was a home run.”...Bloomberg’s John Heilemann: “Between him and Hillary Clinton, this is the most qualified ticket in terms of sheer resume that’s ever run on either ticket in the history of the election.”— MSNBC’s Morning Joe, July 25, 2016.
■ “Kaine checks all the political boxes. Experience — serving at every level of elected office from mayor to U.S. Senator. Battleground credentials — representing Virginia, a key swing state. And fluency in Spanish — speaking directly to crucial Latino voters. To relax, the 58-year-old plays a mean harmonica. His band, the Jug Busters....A devout Catholic who took time away from Harvard Law School to serve as a missionary in Honduras, Kaine attends a mostly black church in a working class neighborhood.”— NBC correspondent Peter Alexander on Today, July 27, 2016.
■ “There’s a suburban dad quality to him, every man, whatever cliche you want to use about it. But there’s a genuineness about it. He seemed conversational in it, and there was — it exuded credibility when he took after Trump.”— NBC’s Chuck Todd during his network’s live coverage of the Democratic convention, July 27, 2016.
KAMALA HARRIS, 2020
■ “She’s so impressive....She is, in my mind, the finest prosecutor I’ve ever seen in my life of watching politics and Washington lawmakers. She’s just unbelievably smart, articulate, and good.”— CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley on CNN Tonight, August 11.
■ “She cares about women’s issues. She cares about equality deep within her soul, from her own experience. We’ve had a great time knowing her so far, and it’s kind of exciting, this pick.”— Co-host Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, August 12.
■ “I thought Kamala Harris gave a fantastic speech. She absolutely nailed it. I think this is one of the finest performances I’ve seen her deliver in terms of a speech. She has tremendous range as a speaker. There are times when she’s incredibly warm and funny and light. She’s talking about spending time with her nieces and her step-kids, being called ‘Mamala,’ cooking dinner.”— Senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson on CNN’s The Situation Room, August 12.
■ “Both of them [Joe Biden and Kamala Harris], they strengthen each other….They’re both steadier together. They’re both stronger together. That was such a beautiful thing to see. I think if you’re going to give a headline today it would be ‘Hope Reborn.’ That’s what I felt. Hope reborn. You just haven’t heard people talking that way about the country and cutting through and seeming authentic...They blew me away. Both of them were stronger today than I’ve seen them in a very long time, if ever.”— Political commentator Van Jones on CNN’s The Situation Room, August 12, 2020.
■ “It’s not just women of color who are celebrating Kamala Harris, it’s women of all colors who are cheering her on. And she seems to check a lot of boxes. I find the Jamaican community’s cheering for her, the Indian community’s cheering for her, the Asian community’s cheering for her, and certainly black America is cheering for her. But I’ve had a lot of white women, too, who have reached out to me and said this is just a great look, as they say, for women all over the world.”— Co-host Gayle King on CBS This Morning, August 19, 2020.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
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