CNN's Monday Situation Room tortured its audience with an out-of-thin-air assessment by Ron Brownstein that James Comey's book and his public visibility would hurt President Donald Trump's standing with white, college-educated voters — because they "look like" him. This is what passes for "analysis" on the formerly serious cable news network.
One might expect someone like CNN Senior Political Analyst Brownstein to have some evidence for the contentions he made about Comey somehow hurting Trump. It's clear that his opinion has no more basis than a street-corner soapbox barker — and perhaps less, given his blindered coastal elite career:
Transcript:
WOLF BLITZER: Ron Brownstein, you study attitudes among the American public. Is Comey changing any minds, or are the American people basically set in their respective ways?
RON BROWNSTEIN: That's an interesting question. If you look at Donald Trump's profile of support relative to any other Republican, the most conspicuous difference, the biggest difference, is that he underperforms Republicans among college-educated white voters. Two new polls (are) out today with him at 40 percent or below among those voters.
Think for a moment about who James Comey is. He is a white man with a post-graduate degree. He's a lawyer. He is the embodiment — and a lifelong Republican — he is the embodiment of the kind of voter that Donald Trump has been driving away from the Republican Party, even as he has brought them greater strength among blue-collar and evangelical and rural whites.
Now James Comey may not move a lot of people personally, but the fact is that he is out there making a case that I think is more direct and unvarnished than we are hearing even from most of the leading Democrats. And it's essentially saying, in a sentence, "Donald Trump is not morally fit to the President, and he is a threat to the rule of law."
And I think that, you know, hearing that argument stated so unequivocally from someone who looks like them and who shares many of their life experiences, I think is a reconfirming kind of perspective that deepens this historic deficit that he's facing with the voters who look most like James Comey.
Goodness gracious. How out of touch can someone be?
James Comey is indeed "mov(ing) a lot of people personally" — to revulsion. As Daniel Halper at the Washington Free Beacon noted on Monday, "I think there's nobody else who engenders so much bipartisan hatred as James Comey."
The reasons for that should be obvious, but in case they're not, former CBS investigative reporter Sheryl Attkisson listed 12 on Sunday, all of them justifying Trump's May decision to fire him. The highlights:
Even many of Trump’s detractors would agree that no president should keep in place the head of a crucial division who — along with some of his top staff — apparently worked to undermine or control the president, and exercised poor judgment in important matters.
...
After the election, Comey informed President-elect Trump about the lurid allegations against him in the so-called “Steele dossier,” but admitted in an interview this week that he withheld from Trump the fact that it was opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton.
...
Comey’s FBI used the “Steele dossier” to justify wiretaps before and after the election on an American citizen who was a Trump associate without disclosing that the “evidence” was political opposition research paid for by Trump’s opponent.
Why in the world would credentials like having a post-graduate degree, or being a lawyer or a (cough, cough) "life-long Republican" mean anything at all to a college-educated white person — or any person?
The better question an average person would be asking themselves about Comey is whether they would want a person like him to be their boss, or friend, or even a nodding acquaintance. The answer, seen in the nation's bipartisan revulsion: "Heck no."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
