On Wednesday’s The Lead, CNN host Jake Tapper questioned Speaker Mike Johnson for eleven minutes on the border, persistently pressing him to compromise with Senate Democrats. After that was over, he turned to political analysts: former Bushie Doug Heye and former Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield.
Heye said Biden’s knows he’s in trouble: “They see the same polling that we do, that Biden's numbers on the border are terrible, and they're really bad with Hispanics as well, a key demographic that he needs to do very well with.”
What Tapper said next, to Bedingfield, was mystifying:
TAPPER: I know that the position of the Biden White House, which he used to belong to, is that, boy, they've done more on the conservative side of things than any Democratic president in recent history, keeping the COVID era rules in for as long as they could, in their view. You know, tightening up asylum laws to the point that they're being sued, and this is, you know, with a -- with a very important Latino base.
The idea that Biden’s done anything identifiably “conservative” on the border is Fake News. Illegal immigration surged from the first months of his presidency. Being to the right of Obama on immigration is noteworthy? Obama's border numbers weren't this high.
Tapper didn’t ask Heye a challenging question at the top, but it’s stranger for him to offer the recently decamped Biden aide a preposterous summary of Biden talking points. He could have at least started with Heye's point and asked her about the bad polls and the historically high surge in illegal immigration. Instead, the guy who mounted a high horse about Fox struggling with Facts is repeating the notion that Biden’s so “conservative” on this!?
We’re in that unintentionally hilarious territory where liberal media outlets used to tout “the chief inflation-fighter of the Carter White House.” That sounds like a positive?
This allowed Bedingfield to declare Republicans have a "vulnerability" if they refuse to compromise with her old boss Biden. Tapper could have at the very least asked her how Biden threads the needle between his own party's radical left -- which doesn't want border control, which wants to cut all the razor wire holding anyone back -- and the majority of Americans who want some reasonable attempt to stem the tide.
