On MSNBC’s The Place for Politics Thursday afternoon, anchor Andrea Mitchell repeatedly invited her Democrat guests to bash the Republican National Convention for it’s supposed ugly “tone” and “vitriol” towards Hillary Clinton. In two separate interviews on the show, Mitchell tried to paint this RNC convention as somehow worse in attacking the opposing candidate than other conventions.
In the first interview with Democrat Senator Al Franken, Mitchell started off by asked him to elaborate on why he disliked Ted Cruz. After Franken stated he “wasn’t alone” in his dislike for the Texas Senator, Mitchell bolstered his opinion saying, “You're not alone in that sentiment. “ She added that it was “rare” for a freshman Senator to “engender” so much hate but “there was a substantive reason.”
Mitchell then contrasted the “substantive reasons” why Cruz was disliked for the supposedly petty, partisan reasons as to why Hillary Clinton wasn’t liked. Mitchell claimed that she’d never seen a candidate “bashed” “at a level of vitriol” that she “frankly couldn’t recall at past conventions.” Franken agreed calling it the “ugliest convention I’d ever seen.”
Franken brought up that it was “not surprising” to see a convention with “so much spewing of hate, lock her up, lock her up, and worse. A lot worse.” After playing a clip of Rudy Giuliani criticizing Clinton, Mitchell pleaded with Franken, “How does she fight back?”
Again, later in the program, Mitchell brought on Washington Post columnists Ruth Marcus and Chris Cillizza where she again posed the question, even echoing Franken’s words: “I want to ask each of you what you feel about the tone, the language, lock her up, lock her up, she's a criminal, throw her in jail and some language that was even worse. Ruth?”
Marcus responded that she found the Republican’s attacks against Clinton “appalling and scary:”
I'm an opinion writer so I'm allowed to use words like this. Appalling and scary. I thought that the -- the venom. It's fine for one party to believe not just that their own candidate is better but that the other party's candidate is really truly bad, but I've never heard and you've probably never heard a convention with this much venom and the sort of mob-like atmosphere of the lock her up chant. We don't lock up political opponents of the United States, we vote against them.
This wasn’t the first time today Mitchell turned from journalist to Hillary Clinton activist. On NBC’s Today show, Mitchell attacked the RNC for their “razor-sharp rhetoric” “trying to demonize” Clinton.
