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New Breed of Younger GOP Surrogates Takes Over

September 02, 2024 ,

Did you watch the Sunday morning talk show circus this week? Or last week? Or actually any time in recent memory?

An overwhelming majority of Americans don’t. The partisan talk fests must compete with church, children's sports events, and watching paint dry.

Once these weekly shows were more than lead-ins to NFL football. They were appointment-viewing, important, honest forums with the probing questions of respected professional hosts like David Brinkley and Brit Hume. 

But for a long while now, those programs have been a sacrificial killing ground for not-always-prepared Republican and conservative guests at the hands of liberal hosts like George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton's former sidekick. 

The conservative guests get set up and played by the highly paid liberal hosts seeking to confirm Democrat narratives and talking points.

Unless there’s a GOP White House wanting to score PR policy points with their big names willing to sacrifice the morning of a coveted day off, the guests are rarely members of the right’s A-Team. 

The programs are brd in the D.C. Swamp, making them very important, you understand, and they play on the abundant self-importance of denizens there, mainly in Congress, and their desperate need or at least appetite for media attention. 

The only way people of lesser importance like, say, governors who are actually running a state, qualify for an invitation is to make a pilgrimage to the important media place. This exclusion appears to confirm the conceit that all things that really matter occur or are consecrated inside the Beltway.

Because fewer of us are watching even in a weird election year, you may have missed an interesting development on the conservative side. 

At least for now, the guests making the Trump and GOP case and more often defending them are much more skilled in answering, deflecting, and responding with positive points to the hosts’ hostile questions.

Prime among those, I would argue, is Tom Cotton, the 6-5, 47-year-old, two-time combat veteran and Arkansas senator, who’s become a major Donald Trump surrogate. 

Cotton, who also served in the Old Guard, the Army’s ceremonial unit at Arlington National Cemetery, even released a supportive statement about the controversy ginned up over Trump’s visit there at the invitation of Gold Star families.

I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about Cotton and from him in the political future, regardless of November’s results. An interesting voice to follow on Twitter.

Unlike some in this cycle’s politics, Cotton speaks quite clearly, pointedly, but clearly. Here’s one of his recent tweets about the ballyhooed CNN interview of Kamala Harris and her backup: 


Then, there's Ohio’s junior senator, JD Vance. He, too, has become a strong and articulate spokesman who doesn’t back down in making the conservative case articulately. 

Oh, look! These guys are not from the usual coastal enclaves of the high and mighty.

I’m not the first to notice this. But the absence of the geriatric GOP crowd with its chronic congressional patois over legislative procedures, votes, and super-majorities is a very refreshing change to those outside the Beltway who don’t care about the capital’s arcane rituals and sports teams.

Cotton, who grew up on his family’s cattle farm in rural Arkansas, was scheduled to be on NBC’s "Meet the Press" Sunday and was on ABC’s "This Week" last week, when his knowledge and recall of Kamala Harris’ positions ran rings around host Jonathan Karl.

Besides dodging formal interviews, save for a brief, non-substantive one on CNN, Harris’ campaign website lacks any detailed policy pages on her positions. That's a tell that she's not so proud of them now.

Harris speaks to reporters safely only off-the-record on the campaign plane. She also sends an unidentified “campaign official” out to tell reporters she’s changed her radical positions against private health care, fracking, Medicare for All, and others.

That’s a wily way to avoid creating incriminating video of Harris walking back her many radical positions, which would cost her progressive votes, but also hides anything that might discourage moderate support. Helps her avoid the need to answer damaging questions about flip-flopping, a move she must make to sidle toward the center. 

And sympathetic media can claim she’s really a moderate centrist. Until Cotton shows up with the truth and turns the table.

In one exchange, Cotton correctly noted Harris’ existing policy position would remove health care from millions of Americans. That led to this revealing exchange:

KARL: What do you mean taking away health insurance? What are you talking about?

COTTON:  She said when she ran for president that she wants to eliminate private health insurance on the job of 170 million Americans, Jon.

KARL:  Yeah, I mean -- I mean that is not her position now. She… 

COTTON:  How do you know that's not her position? How do you know that's not her position?

KARL:  I mean, she said she no longer supports Medicare for all. 

COTTON:  She has not said that. She has not said that. She has not said that.

KARL:  OK.

COTTON:  Maybe anonymous aides on a Friday night have said that. 

No yelling. Just a sold grasp of the facts, rapid recall, and firm assertions of them that the host doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know.

Our HotAir colleague Ed Morrissey also wrote:

How does anyone know what positions Kamala Harris holds now? Her campaign leaks some ambiguous reversals to media outlets willing to blithely carry that water rather than demand access to the candidate herself. But Harris herself has taken no positions at all, except for a brief and disastrous foray into 'price gauging.'

As Trump’s primary surrogate, Vance is doing much the same. He’s especially smooth and effective when Sunday hosts go to abortion and the threat they like to cite of a national abortion ban, while Trump favors individual states handling the issue. 


The gotcha got gotcha-ed.



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