We “rethink the week” with Dean Spiliotis, Civic Scholar and Presidential Scholar at Southern New Hampshire University; Valerie Endress, Professor of Political Communication at Rhode Island College; and Mark Fernald, attorney and former gubernatorial candidate in New Hampshire.
We discuss Trump’s obsession with digging up dirt on Joe Biden, even if he has to shake down a foreign government’s president to do so. But we also agree that Biden himself could have handled Trump’s attacks much better. He could have acknowledged, when the story first broke, that his son Hunter did indeed display bad judgment when he accepted a well-paid position on the board of a Ukrainian oil/gas company even though he (Hunter) had no legitimate qualification for the position (except that his father was Joe Biden). If Joe had offered this small bit of recognition that Hunter’s decision was a bad idea and that, at the very least, its *appearance* was problematic — and of course that he, Joe, played no role in it — then everyone could have moved on to more legitimate policy issues. But Biden’s hyper-defensive shut-down of any discussion about his son (witness his harsh words in yesterday’s Iowa Town Hall) provides the Republicans with a continuous “issue” with which to pummel him.
We go on to talk about money in politics, focusing on the role of billionaire candidates for president. Former Mayor Bloomberg has already spent more than $40 million on ads criticizing various candidates’ policy proposals, and he won’t even officially enter the race for several months, until after many important primaries have ended.
Bloomberg has harmed our electoral process in an even more important way: by skewing the election coverage provided by the enormous media empire which he owns. He has ordered Bloomberg News to refrain from covering not only Bloomberg’s own campaign but also from covering any of the other Democratic presidential candidates. This gives Pres. Trump some cover for complaining that “mainstream media” reporters are going after only him and not the Democrats. In short, constraining Bloomberg News undermines the freedom of the press, and sets a dangerous precedent for future press coverage of candidates who may, like Bloomberg, enjoy great economic power.
