On Tuesday night, the major broadcast networks were quick to laud former President Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) as “heartwarming” and “the most important speech of his life” featuring “vintage Bill” that was akin to him “telling a family story at bar or around the dinner table at a holiday.”
Somehow, CBS and NBC barely mentioned how Bill ignored his sexual affairs and impeachment as a chapter in his history with Hillary but in a somewhat miracle, the network anchored by Clinton Foundation donor George Stephanopoulos found a way to discuss it on his show.
Taking CBS first, CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King echoed the thoughts of delegates that she spoke to that it was a “heartwarming” address in which Bill “had a job to do and they said he did it well.”
“Many people feel, you've heard this many times that Hillary Clinton is most famous person that you don't know. Well, Bill Clinton wanted us to know about her. He took us on a very long chronology of their lives as Nancy pointed out, from their first meeting, to Chelsea's birth to their first job to their proposal,” she proclaimed.
Going into commercial, fellow CBS This Morning co-host Norah O’Donnell quipped that it was “vintage Bill” featuring “the storytelling with all his lip biting too.” The third co-host of the morning program in Charlie Rose opined minutes later that, in his understanding, “Bill Clinton thought this was the most important speech of his life.”
O’Donnell later touted Bill as far superior to the plagiarized speech Melania Trump gave last week “[b]ecause he told stories” including “that moment when he first met, reached out to touch her and he couldn't and she walked away and wanting to meet her.”
ABC featured significant time devoted to Bill’s indiscretions from the 1990s as Stephanopoulos told former Bush official and ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd that:
[He] skipped over the year 1998, Matthew Dowd. He did refer to some good times and bad times, did not talk about the crisis in their marriage and the impeachment by Congress. There’ll be a lot of debate if that was the right or wrong decision, whether it would have overwhelmed the rest of the speech.
Dowd responded in agreement in tying it to “one of the fundamental problems” the Clintons have on transparency and predicted that America “would have responded unbelievably” in a positive way if he had at least referenced that contentious time.
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Chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl was also able to offer some rare criticism of the Clintons as he admitted that Hillary being dubbed a “changemaker” will be awfully difficult to make since the Clintons and Obamas have combined to run the White House for “16 of the last 24 years” and ruled that “it seemed a bit of a diminished Bill Clinton out there” in terms of being more low energy.
Amidst the criticism, Clinton campaign correspondent Cecilia Vega offered some swooning imagery about how she viewed the speech that’ll make NewsBusters readers cringe [emphasis mine]:
I have to tell you, sitting out here, this felt very much like Bill Clinton telling a family story at a bar, or around the dinner table at a holiday. It was a play by play of their life and he started by saying, I met a girl back in the spring of 1971, talking about the three times that he had to propose to her before Hillary Clinton finally said yes. We knew this was going to be a personal story but we didn't know this was going to be Bill Clinton attempting to reintroduce one of America’s best known politicians to this country. George, her campaign has long said, behind the scenes, that he is the secret weapon for her on this campaign trail and tonight, he proved himself to be a very valuable asset going forward.
NBC Nightly News co-host Lester Holt didn’t have quite the same feelings but still observed: “If there was any doubt that Bill Clinton could still stir up a crowd, that was quickly erased today.”
“I think so. It was very folksy, this retelling of their love story. They're trying to make her human and it got very literal at the end. Bill Clinton saying, ‘There's the real Hillary, the one I know and the one I've tried to tell you about tonight and there's this caricature we've been seeing from her political opponents,’” Today co-host Savannah Guthrie added.
Clinton campaign correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell did her part to try and tout Bill’s story about seeing Hillary in a library as something that women of today could easily relate to:
Their polling tells them that they have a problem, as you know, with young people, young women in particular. And this was to try to fill in the gaps of the resume. To try to explain who she was as a real person, and that's why he started with, “In 1971, I met a girl.” And these young college girls who have not related to her in the New Hampshire primary and elsewhere, maybe they can think that that Yale law library is something that they're familiar with.”
