On Monday, Katie Couric, former CBS Evening News anchor and current Yahoo Global News anchor, sat down with David Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Obama, to discuss his memoir Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.
While much of the interview featured Couric tossing open-ended questions at Axelrod, the former CBS News anchor managed to ask him about a claim he made in which Mitt Romney called President Obama on election night in 2012 and told him that he won as a result of getting out the minority vote in Milwaukee and Cleveland. This was in stark contrast to CBS This Morning, which eagerly promoted Axelrod’s hit on Romney but failed to question him on it during a February 10 interview.
Speaking to Axelrod, Couric noted that “[y]ou say the governor called the president to concede in 2012 and implied race had something to do with the victory, that your camp was successful at getting out the vote in Cleveland and Milwaukee, code for urban, black votes. The Romney camp said Governor Romney never said that so somebody here is not telling the truth.”
In contrast to Couric, CBS News, promoted Axelrod’s Romney hit on February 4 with CBS This Morning co-host Norah O’Donnell proclaiming that in his book ““President Obama was slightly irritated by Mitt Romney’s concession call in 2012...Listen to this. Axelrod claims that when Romney called the Republican suggested the president won by getting out the black vote.”
When CBS This Morning spoke with Axelrod on February 10 to promote his book, the three co-hosts ignored the Democrat’s accusation against Romney and instead treated him to a friendly softball interview.
Even though Couric did press Axelrod on Obama’s refusal to label ISIS an Islamic extremist group as well as his revelation that the president lied about his opposition to gay marriage during the 2008 Democratic primary, the Yahoo News anchor found time to get in two questions aimed at criticizing the GOP:
Let’s talk about Jeb Bush. Clearly he’s running, rapidly picking up support and money. Scott Walker today pivoted to the right with his views on abortion saying that he thought that it was necessary to have a personhood amendment. But Jeb Bush is trying to stay relatively middle of the roads on issues like gay marriage and immigration with an eye on the general election. Can he pull that off or will he too have to pivot to the right?
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You write in the book “no other president has seen his citizenship openly and persistently questioned. Never before has a president been interrupted in the middle of a national address by a congressman screaming ‘you lie.’” Do you think these things would have happened to Barack Obama had he been white?
See the full interview here.
