The New York Times Magazine has posted its Sunday cover story on ABC's The View, touted as "The Most Important Political TV Show in America." Amanda FitzSimons begins with Joy Behar lunching with and sucking up to Michael Cohen before he went to prison, trying to get him on the show. Now that he had turned on Donald Trump, he was suddenly a "sympathetic character." Cohen didn't come on the show.
Behar lamented that Hillary Clinton made a big mistake not coming on the show more than once in 2016 so she could show she was a "gregarious grandma." ABC wanted to help her win, and she didn't cooperate!
Hillary Clinton was on the show only once during the last presidential campaign — “a mistake,” Behar told me. Regular appearances, Behar thinks, would have helped voters see a more human side of Clinton. “Her people who kept her away from this show should have been fired,” Behar says.
During her interview in April 2016, Clinton discussed her email scandal, Trump and how decades in the public eye forced her to develop a thick skin. (“Anybody who’s interested, I have great creams for it,” she deadpanned.) It wasn’t a goofy interview, like the cringe-worthy clip of her dabbing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, but it showed a relaxed side of a candidate who was often criticized for being too stiff.
On The View, Behar says, “Americans saw the lovely person I know — the laughing, happy, gregarious grandma that she is, in addition to being so smart. They didn’t see it on other shows.”
This is always a little amusing for conservatives, the lament that people didn't see enough of the "human side" of Dukakis or Gore or Kerry or Hillary Clinton. It's never the liberalism. It's their personality.
Would more Hillary interviews really make a difference? After all, the Times story reports 72 percent of the audience are women, and "According to the consumer-intelligence company MRI-Simmons, almost 65 percent of its viewers who are registered to vote are Democrats, and only 12.6 percent are Republicans."
FitzSimons noted that the show's liberal audience seems to "hate-watch" Meghan McCain, and then (like Saturday Night Live skits) mock her for "meltdowns" and brattiness and white privilege:
Just as Behar has a knack for making pronouncements that seem perfectly engineered to make Tucker Carlson want to tear his hair out, McCain presses buttons for a certain kind of liberal who finds her views the apotheosis of white privilege — as does her tendency to lose her composure or name-drop her father. On YouTube, there are pages and pages of videos with titles like “Meghan McCain MELTS DOWN Over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”; “Meghan McCain Breaks Down ‘Crying’ After Getting Smacked Down”; “Meghan McCain Being a Brat on ‘The View’ (Part 1).” It’s a role she seems to relish.
But it was a surprise for McCain to be praised by porn star Stormy Daniels:
McCain has also acquired unlikely fans. Stormy Daniels, whose appearance on The View in April 2018 — in which she revealed a sketch of the man she believes threatened her on behalf of Trump — drew 3.3 million viewers, told me in a statement: “She probably earned more respect from me than any other person that interviewed me.”
McCain, she explained, made points that producers had asked the host not to bring up but that Daniels thought were “completely valid.” (“It seems like a publicity stunt on some level,” McCain told Daniels. “It does seem like you’re benefiting a lot. I mean, you’ve gone on your Make America Horny Again tour. I’m sure you’re making a lot of money.”) McCain, Daniels said, “allowed me the opportunity to answer, and she listened — open-minded, openhearted — and really understood what I was saying.”
