Despite co-host, Obama family friend, and Kamala Harris donor Gayle King getting an early start on the weekend, Friday’s CBS Mornings still had plenty of partisan lunacy reacting to the final night of the Democratic National Convention and describing Kamala Harris’s speech that “echo[ed] Obama” and “[brought] down the house” with “[t]he sound of history” and “a feat of political athleticism.”
Later, CBS’s Major Garrett found a way to beclown himself by zooming out on the campaign and describing her as “the new person” and “challenger” like Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008, making Trump the incumbent in an election where abortion, he asserted, “will be the most underlying, most pivotal, most motivating issue” that will decide the election (and not the economy, inflation, border, etc.).
As always, the teases gave us something. Here was featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers: “Vice President Harris brings down the house as she formally accepts her party’s nomination for president of the United States.”
Leading the show’s coverage from the DNC, co-host Tony Dokoupil said Harris “echo[ed] Obama that” her story “is only possible in America and on the issues, her promise to voters is change and opportunity” with a sense of “security and dignity and balance” restored.
Senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang proclaimed that, with Harris officially accepting the party’s nomination, “[t]he sound of history in the making” rang out in the United Center with Harris “vow[ing] to fight for the future.”
CBS News contributor and former Obama official Joel Payne obviously loved the speech, but how much?
Well, he dubbed it “the perfect game” to borrow a baseball analogy, adding in another that “last night was a feat of political athleticism” with a speech that was “difficult” after having “navigated” “valleys...to keep” the Democratic “coalition together” since President Biden quit the race.
“It was a patriotic speech. It was a speech that was very strong on defense, a lot of pride and talk of democracy,” Dokoupil replied.
This queued Payne up to gush Harris “reclaimed the freedom mantle” and “[rode]...the emotion and the energy of the crowd”, adding she showed “political athleticism” in particular when discussing the Israel vs. Hamas war.
The second half-hour had another trademark Dokoupil man-on-the-street segment. This time, it was with DNC attendees, which revealed they “actually don’t really need a detailed platform to feel that they already know exactly what she stands for.”
Here were two key passages (click “expand”):
DOKOUPIL: When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, she had more than 200 different policy proposals, a level of detail Joe Biden matched with a 110-page policy pitch in 2020, both packed with lots of interviews.
JOE BIDEN: We have to bring the middle class back. We have to have a health care policy that makes sense.
HARRIS: How are you doing, Hannah?
DOKOUPIL: Harris, by contrast, hasn’t done a single major media interview or even added a policy section to her campaign website, and that’s perfectly fine, at least for these Democratic delegates.
WOMAN: Everything is happening really fast. Give her a minute, and you’ll hear everything that you need to hear.
DOKOUPIL: They say voters already know exactly where she stands on reproductive rights, and she started rolling out some economic policies, too. Beyond that, they’re not worried.
WOMAN #1: She has been at the White House for four years. She knows the policies, she’s been doing on-the-job training for four years. That’s the kicker.
WOMAN #2: She’s not going to move far off the policies where we are now, if she moved it all as far as President Biden hatch, after all, she was his vice president.
DOKOUPIL: And yet — she’s not going to take all the policies of the Biden administration, right?
WOMAN #2: No.
DOKOUPIL: More than a third of Americans say they don’t know where Kamala Harris stands.
HARRIS: We will chart a new way forward.
DOKOUPIL: And when you get down to specific issues, neither do a lot of the people who voted to nominate her. Energy policy? Is she for all the above? Is she for limiting oil and gas? What?
WOMAN: Is she for all that?
DOKOUPIL: I don’t know.
WOMAN #1: Well, I don’t need either.
WOMAN #2: You know, I think what we’re looking at is trying to figure that out.
DOKOUPIL: What’s her position on marijuana legalization?
MAN: I’m waiting. I’m waiting to hear with you on the same on those issues.
DOKOUPIL: But whatever the policies of a potential Harris administration, many folks here are certain they’ll be better than the alternative.
MAN: We can’t go back to Trump. I think the values of democracy, that I put time and effort to become a citizen, to defend and protect. I feel that’s an insult what happened.
(....)
DOKOUPIL: Two points, of course, that I grant on the Democrats’ behalf is that the other side, well, they have put a mosh pit of policies together over the years, about as fixed as a plate of Jell-O, and then, on the other hand, if she were to roll out all of these detailed policies right away, that would be suspicious as well, who wrote them? The reality is, policy is hard. It takes time to get there, and ultimately, what these voters, these delegates, told me is that they know she’s going to have to work with Congress. It’s not clear who’s going to control those Houses of Congress and the reality is, if she has an idea of what her values are, shares it with the voters and tells you where she wants to go, the details are going to get worked out later.
This led into Garrett with his analogy that Trump has been turned into the incumbent with Harris — despite being the sitting Vice President for nearly four years (and Trump out of office for that long) — the “challenger” akin to Clinton in 1992:
[T]hat speech last night clarifies one aspect of this campaign, who is the challenger and who is the face of incumbency? Joe Biden was the face of incumbency until he dropped out. Kamala Harris, with that speech said, I’m the challenger. I’m the new person, and I have to introduce myself, explain who I am, what I am in a way that Bill Clinton did in 1992 when he was the challenger, Barack Obama did in 2008. She did not give the incumbent administrative speech. She gave I’m the introducing speech. I’m the challenger. This is what frustrates the Trump campaign so much. This arrow of incumbency, has that which incumbency is not just a job title, it’s a state of mind, and it shifted in Trump’s direction. Trump is now the hyper familiar face of American politics for now, going on 10 years, and he’s trying to get out of that. And this convention was a way for Harris to say, I’m the challenger. We have possibilities. There is something new.
Asked by fill-in co-host Jericka Duncan if policy still matters, Garrett replied that “it does matter” and offered the second screwball take: “[T]his election will be the first national presidential campaign post the end of Roe vs. Wade. On that directional matter, Harris is clear, and I believe that will be the underlying, most pivotal, most motivating issue in the country.”
On a more positive note, the fact-check lead off the second hour, including one major talking point of the left that the Trump tax cuts were (only) for the rich. The others concerned the national debt and tariffs (click “expand”):
HARRIS: He doesn’t actually fight for the middle class. Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends, and he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.
(....)
DOKOUPIL: On that first claim that Donald Trump wants to pass tax cuts for the rich, adding $5 trillion to the national debt in the process, that’s misleading, according to our CBS News confirm team, which is a term, of course, that could be applied to a lot of our political speech, but I digress. Here’s how they got to that label. Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts did indeed lower taxes for the rich, aka high income earners. But here’s the thing, it also lower taxes for most households. So, in the short term, most people, not only the rich would benefit from these tax cuts being extended. All of that, by the way, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and the nonpartisan, Tax Policy Center. Now, Kamala Harris’s claim about the national debt going up, she was right about that, although it increased by $4.6 trillion, not $5 trillion she rounded up by a couple hundred billion on this, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. All right, let’s take a look at the next one.
HARRIS: All the while, he intends to enact what in effect is a national sales tax, call it a Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle class families by almost $4,000.00 a year.
DOKOUPIL: So here’s what’s happening here. Donald Trump supports tariffs on foreign goods, and Kamala Harris says that those tariffs would end up costing American families. She calls them a tax. So, is it a tax? Well, that’s a partially true claim, according to our CBS News confirm team, and here’s the context they provide. Economists tell us that consumers would feel this tariff because the cost would be passed on and the prices would definitely spike for normal household goods, but Harris’s numbers are off. That 10 percent tariff combined with a 60 percent tariff on Chinese imports will cost about $1,800.00 per household in 2025. Significant, yes, but not $4,000.00. All of this, according to the nonpartisan, Tax Policy Center.
To see the relevant CBS transcript from August 23 (including a segment on Trump’s visit Thursday to the Arizona side of the U.S.-Mexico border), click here.
