The journalists at CBS This Morning on Tuesday worried about the “risks” of Trump’s “aggressive” attitude towards Hillary Clinton. Charlie Rose pondered as to whether it was “smart or stupid.” Journalists don’t often worry about the fate of Republican candidates.
Yet, Face the Nation host John Dickerson appeared on the show and fretted over journalists being manipulated: “So what [Trump] does is he sends a warning shot about how he's going to talk about Bill Clinton's personal life and Hillary Clinton's involvement in that, and then the press talks about it and brings all of this up.”
He also insisted that the Clinton campaign will try and “stick to the issues”:
JOHN DICKERSON: And the Clinton campaign is going to try and stick to the issues. When there are personal attacks, they'll try to wrap it in issues that face regular people. So if it's about women, it's about family and medical leave and that kind of thing, leaving the attacks to their super PAC.
Telegraphing what the Clinton campaign will do with a media assist, Nancy Cordes noted Trump’s unpopularity with women: “If the Democrats can cement those views now, Gayle, it means Clinton will have a much easier time in the fall.”
Over on NBC, Today’s Chuck Todd lectured that Barack Obama will be Clinton’s campaign “character witness.”
A transcript of the CBS segment is below:
CBS This Morning
5/17/16
7:08CHARLIE ROSE: CBS News political director and Face the Nation host John Dickerson is in Washington. John, good morning.
JOHN DICKERSON: Good morning, Charlie.
ROSE: Is Trump's aggressiveness smart or stupid?
DICKERSON: Well, it's smart in the sense that he gets the press to talk about this, and he doesn't have to. So what he does is he sends a warning shot about how he's going to talk about Bill Clinton's personal life and Hillary Clinton's involvement in that, and then the press talks about it and brings all of this up and asks whether it's a problem or not. And then it gets a big airing. It's a bit of a chilling effect on the Clinton campaign, perhaps. And also, it's one step away from him. But in the end, if he has to actually bring this up, he's already done several times in his campaign, he has that option as well.
GAYLE KING: What are the risks here, John?
DICKERSON: Well, the risks are that — and we'll see in this campaign whether the old rules, which is that candidates had to offer an optimistic vision, a sense of the future. Right now it looks like on both sides we're talking about a campaign that's going to be a referendum on the other side. So the Trump campaign will be about Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton's campaign will be about Donald Trump. And so the downside is that everybody gets thoroughly turned off even more than they already are.
ROSE: Whose campaign will be about the future?
DICKERSON: Well, one of them has got to grab it. Of course, they would both say their campaign is about the future, but the question is what comes through? And the Clinton campaign is going to try and stick to the issues. When there are personal attacks, they'll try to wrap it in issues that face regular people. So if it's about women, it's about family and medical leave and that kind of thing, leaving the attacks to their super PAC. But as it comes across to voters, they're not necessarily going to distinguish what's an attack from the super PAC and what's an attack from the actual campaign.
O’DONNELL: This race, according to a new poll out this morning, shows it extremely tight in a general election match-up. Already a super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton, as Nancy Cordes pointed out, is going to spend close to $100 million in these months attacking Trump on the very issue of his comments about women. Could that hurt him severely by the time he gets going in September?
DICKERSON: Well, based on the polls right now and his unfavorable view among women, it's hard to imagine it hurting him anymore than he's already hurt with women voters. So, what they want to do, as Nancy mentioned, is lock in that opinion of him early and define him before he can try to redefine himself. So the downside for Hillary Clinton that they know about, which is that women will think, well, she's just running on her gender. And so that's why they're going to try while the super PAC is making the character attacks on Trump, they'll try to make policy arguments to women that say this is why Hillary Clinton cares about you and lay it out in policies so that people don't think, well, she's just trying to get my vote because she's a woman.
