In preparation for Democrats possibly losing control of the Senate in the midterm election, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd and his panel actually tried to preemptively spin such a defeat as a good thing for the Democratic Party. On Sunday, Todd proclaimed: "What everybody in Washington knows but won't say, and that is, secretly...I'm convinced, I think we know this, Hillary Clinton would love to see the Senate in Republican hands going into 2016, wouldn't she?" [Listen to the audio]
Politico's Jim VandeHei agreed: "I think a lot of Democrats would. They never say it in public. Because everybody knows virtually nothing is going to happen over the next two years, and Democrats, Hillary Clinton in particular, would love Republicans, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, to actually have to take ownership of some of the dysfunction."
Chuck Todd
On Thursday's NBC Today, several hours after NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel ripped President Obama's strategy to combat ISIS as being "wildly off-base," correspondent Peter Alexander promoted the commander-in-chief's Wednesday primetime address: "President Obama announced that he would lead a broad coalition to destroy ISIS....The war will be more like those in Yemen and Somalia, Mr. Obama stressed..." [Listen to the audio]
At the core of Engel's criticism of the President was the notion that the same strategy used to combat Al Qaeda forces in places like Yemen and Somalia could also be used to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Engel dismissed the idea as "an oversimplification of the problem," warning that the situations were "not comparable at all."
At the end of a report on Wednesday's NBC Today about President Obama's upcoming speech on combating ISIS terrorists, correspondent Peter Alexander sympathetically observed: "The primetime nature of this speech really underscores its stakes, but also a significant shift for this President, who wanted to leave the White House as a peacetime president. But now...is likely to commit the country to what some say could be another potentially costly military campaign." [Listen to the audio]
In the segment that followed, co-host Matt Lauer led off a discussion with Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd on that sentiment: "Peter just said the President wanted to leave office as a peacetime president. ISIS makes the decision whether he leaves as a wartime president." Todd replied: "He's been reluctant and we know over about a ten-day period he seemed to be the last one in his administration acknowledging that there needed to be a military campaign."
After attending the NATO summit in Wales, President Obama only managed to convince 9 of the 28 member nations to join the U.S.-led effort to combat the ISIS terror network in Iraq and Syria. Despite such a failure to gain support from America's allies, on Monday's NBC Today, new Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd emphasized how the President wanted "to make this coalition against ISIS...look like the coalition that George H.W. Bush, back in 1990 and '91...put together to go after Saddam Hussein." [Listen to the audio]
Todd never mentioned how far short Obama had fallen of that goal, but asserted: "They don't want like some small coalition of two or three nations where it really is just the United States and a couple of symbolic countries."
In his inaugural episode as moderator of Meet The Press, Chuck Todd hits President Obama with a question from the left on the president's decision to postpone the granting of amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants until after the November, 2014 congressional elections: "what do you tell the person that's going to get deported before the election that this decision was essentially made in your hopes of saving a Democratic Senate."
Psst! Psst! Sunday news show hosts are mere conduits for executive producers whispering questions into their earpieces according to a New Republic editor.
Eeeeek!!!
Diversity of political opinion must not be permitted. Expressing this deep fear is Washington Monthly contributor Ed Kilgore who is worried about a politically diversified panel at the post David Gregory Meet The Press. He presents his "remedy" in an article boldly titled, Who Should Be Banned as Panelists For the New “Meet?” What has gotten Kilgore so worried that contrary opinion might creep into Meet The Press is a New York Times article about NBC News President Deborah Turness considering the use of a panel to question guests as was done in the original Meet The Press:
"We regret to report that David Gregory will be leaving Meet The Press in order to spend more time with his family." Or perhaps it will be, "David Gregory is leaving Meet The Press in order to pursue other projects."
Those are a couple of polite corporate ways to announce the firing of the Meet The Press host with the terrible ratings. According to the New York Post's Page Six, the replacement of David Gregory could be happening right after the midterm elections. No surprise there given the fact that under Gregory, Meet The Press has fallen to last place in the broadcast television Sunday interview shows. Also not surprising is that NBC is planning on replacing liberal Gregory with equally liberal Chuck Todd or Savannah Guthrie according to the Page Six report:
On October 3, as Kyle Brennan's at NewsBusters noted the next day, NBC News political director Chuck Tood, appearing on CNBC, characterized presidential polls generated by Scott Rasmussen's polling group as "slop."
The specific quote: "We spend a lot more money polling than Scott Rasmussen does. We spend a lot more money on quality control....I hate the idea that [NBC] polling, which is rigorously done, has to get compared to what is, in some cases, you know, slop." At the time, while many polls, including NBC's (done in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal), were showing Barack Obama with leads of four points or more nationally, Rasmussen was virtually alone Obama barely ahead and occasionally tied with Mitt RomneyChuck was clearly not pleased with that. Someone ought to ask Todd if his evaluation holds based on the results following the jump which were posted at Real Clear Politics early Friday morning.
Early on Thursday's The Daily Rundown on MSNBC, as news was breaking of the reported death of Libyan dictator Moammar Qadhafi, host Chuck Todd used the opportunity to declare: "...a trillion dollars and thousands of U.S. lives to topple a dictator in Iraq, it's a billion dollars and no U.S. lives to topple a dictator in Libya. That's a – that's a pretty stark contrast." [Audio available here]
Todd, NBC's chief White House correspondent, made the gratuitous shot at the Bush administration while talking to Robin Wright of the liberal Woodrow Wilson Center, who proclaimed: "...this is going to be an enormous success for the Obama administration in looking at how quickly it was done, with what international cooperation....it's one where the United States changes the narrative from what happened in Iraq." [View video after the jump]
In an interview with Michele Bachmann on Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer actually delayed discussion of job creation as he pushed her to attack Texas Governor Rick Perry: "We'll talk about jobs in a second, but I do want to stick on this controversy over...Perry mandating vaccinations for HPV."
Bachmann had attempted to begin on the subject of President Obama's jobs plan, but Lauer quickly steered her toward Republican infighting: "You not only question the policy [of mandating the HPV vaccine], but you questioned the motivation behind it, suggesting rather strongly that this could have been an attempt to appease a big drug company, Merck, because they contributed to his campaign. So I want you to lay this out for me. Is that what you are asserting?"
During a report on Tuesday's Nightly News, White House correspondent Chuck Todd was largely dismissive of the current crop of Republican candidates: "[Mitt Romney] skipped the first debate last week, leaving Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty as the only major contender alongside a slew of long shots jockeying for attention."
But when it came to President Obama, Todd declared: "One of the few announced candidates for president was out campaigning and raising money today." Later, Todd put pressure on GOP hopefuls that had yet to announce: "With the clock ticking and President Obama raking in millions, some on the fence are making decisions."
In a similar report on Wednesday's Today, Todd proclaimed: "...the busiest presidential candidate hadn't been a Republican, it's been the incumbent, Barack Obama....[he] worked crowds in Texas, Tuesday, raising money in his push for a second term....with a confident president out raising millions, [GOP] candidates are starting to make decisions."