On the Friday night PBS roundtable Washington Week, the journalists offered the usual servings for the two parties. The Democrats were merely described...and the Republicans were marked as doomed to lose.
President Biden's term has been defined by inflation and his re-election is wracked with concerns over his age -- that he would be president until age 86. But the Democrat journalists just say hey, Biden's going to make jokes and make his weakness his strength!
Margaret Talev of Axios.com explained Team Biden's strategy: "they are placing their bets on it, and they've decided, the same way they kind of have with age, how he's making jokes about how old he is. They've just decided that he should own the economy. I don't know if it's going to work, but that's what they're trying to do."
But the Republicans are far too outside the mainstream of woke culture. PBS host Laura Barron-Lopez played a snippet of a pro-DeSantis ad touting how he's horrified the liberals as "extreme" on LGBTQ issues (as if they aren't radicals). Republicans will lose the general election, the journalists agreed.
Susan Page of USA Today started it off: “It's one of the things that DeSantis has done, like signing a six-week ban on abortion. That may help him in Republican primaries, although so far, it`s not helping him much. It will haunt him if he gets into the general election as the Republican nominee, because that attitude toward LGBTQ rights is quite at odds with where American public opinion is today.”
At least Talev underlined the ad didn’t come from the DeSantis campaign, but a DeSantis superPAC shared it, and “if the purpose of this was to show that Donald Trump is to the left and that he has embraced gay rights, that's where the ad would have stopped. The purpose of the ad is to begin there and then to define Ron DeSantis as the sort of champion of anti-gay, anti-trans positions. And so it begins as being about Donald Trump, but in the end, it`s not really about Donald Trump. It's much more about positioning Ron DeSantis.”
Sabrina Siddiqui of The Wall Street Journal said trying to run to Trump’s right on social issues didn’t work for Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz in 2016. “And so I think what Governor DeSantis is going to learn is that it's a really delicate balance when you're trying to figure out how to out-trump Trump, and that running to the right of Trump really has not proven successful when, again, it's more about the cult of personality than is about any real policy debate within the Republican Party.”
Barron-Lopez concluded: “That video is definitely, as you said, Margaret, very anti-LGBTQ, anti-transgender, and not necessarily something that will help Ron DeSantis or former President Trump on the campaign trail in the general electorate, if they make to the general electorate.”
Democrats can support "gender-affirming care" for children and Drag Queen Story Hour in public schools and they're never outside the mainstream. The journalists on PBS are unanimous.
Washington Week is supported in part by Consumer Cellular.
