Just minutes after the Cable News Network aired an interview with Hillary Clinton conducted by anchor Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash -- the channel's chief political correspondent -- angrily responded to the claim by the front-runner for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination that no one in the media had asked GOP nominee Donald Trump “the tough questions.”
“I was jumping out of my skin” when Clinton said that on Wednesday afternoon, Bash responded before stating that Cooper “was maybe too much of a gentleman to start sparring with her.”
Bash continued:
OK, Anderson asked him tough questions, I've asked him tough questions. I mean, everybody has from the debate stage to interviews.
I mean, the man has done so many interviews, and we have tried to mine the … policy positions that he has, and he doesn't give answers.
“The problem wasn't the interviewer,” she continued. “The problem was that ... the voters who supported him didn't really seem to care.”
The CNN correspondent expressed concern “that Hillary Clinton is still sort of stuck on that, which I'm not saying isn't important.”
“We all ask the questions,” she continued. “It is important to know where a presidential candidate stands on very important issues, but she's missing the point of the Trump candidacy, which is these voters don't care about experience.”
Members of the GOP “have the most talented Republican field with the most experience and the detailed policy plans in modern history, and they actively rejected that,” Dash asserted.
Instead, the CNN anchor claimed, Republicans “support somebody who went with their emotions, somebody who they thought was going to come and be different.”
Hillary Clinton has been “saying over and over again” that Trump “doesn't have the experience. He's a loose cannon,” Dash continued.
“That might be true,” she noted, but Clinton is “appealing to the voters' heads, and what Donald Trump has been so successful in is appealing to their hearts.”
In addition, the GOP nominee is “appealing to the people who are again aggressively and actively rejecting somebody with the kind of experience that she's proposing,” Dash concluded.
As NewsBusters previously reported, this interview was the first Hillary Clinton took part in after Donald Trump was anointed as the presumptive 2016 Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday night.
In the midst of the “classic softball, scandal-free interview,” Clinton demanded her liberal media friends “make the tough decisions” and “get serious” in attacking Trump.
Clinton acknowledged that Trump has used “an unconventional media strategy” to seize the nomination, but now is the time “to make the tough decisions, and you've got to the ask him, okay, so what exactly would you replace X, Y and Z with?” she added.
In a typical exchange, Cooper asked: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren “said Donald Trump has built his campaign on racism, xenophobia and sexism. Do you agree with that?”
Clinton replied coyly: “I think Elizabeth Warren is very smart.”
In fact, the only time Clinton opponent Bernie Sanders – a senator from Vermont who won the primary contest in Indiana the day before – was mentioned in the discussion was when Cooper stated that the candidate “is obviously taking issue with people calling you the presumptive nominee on the Democratic side.”
“What do you say to his supporters?” he asked. “Should you be considered the presumptive nominee at this point?”
Tough questions indeed.
