Recently retired CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer won a lifetime achievement award from the Poynter Institute on Friday night, and was asked about his thoughts on the 2016 presidential race. Donald Trump could be the GOP nominee, he said, “We’re a long way from the nominating parties...But I do think it’s conceivable.”
Current CBS reporter Margaret Brennan also asked Schieffer about the Democratic race for 2016, honing in on whether the attention Hillary Clinton’s email scandal has received is justified. He said her campaign was terrible, even "astonishingly inept" (not quite an answer to whether the scandal is worth covering):
“I think her campaign is in trouble,” Schieffer said.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be rescued, he added, but when a candidate announces that she’ll be holding “listening tours,” he said, people see through that.
“I find her campaign astonishingly inept,” Schieffer said.
When campaign staffers announce that they’re making their candidate more human, and they’re doing so because they ran a focus group, it comes across as fake.
“Well what could be more artificial?” he said. “You couldn’t take the money out in the backyard and set it afire in a bushel and spend more money than they’re spending.”
The headline was "2016 'makes me think, man, I wish I hadn't retired.'"
