Though many in media have written off GOP front-runner Donald Trump as a joke candidate, longtime newsman Bob Schieffer is not one of them.
“I take Donald Trump very seriously now. I think he could wind up getting the Republican nomination,” the former host of CBS News’ “Face the Nation” said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette.
Schieffer suggested that one of the reasons Trump is polling so well with voters is that he has been very clever about figuring out which issues have Americans most concerned.
“I think [Trump has] made a very good list, a wonderful catalog, of all the things that people are upset about and worried about and concerned about. He hasn’t proposed any solutions, but he has managed to make a list of things that people feel frustrated about, and I think this frustration comes from the fact that the government doesn’t work anymore,” Schieffer said.
Schieffer’s comments came in response to being asked to comment on the 2016 presidential race as a whole.
“Every campaign is different, and this may be the most different yet. I think we’re at a real turning point in this country. I think we’ve had a total breakdown in our political system: the way we elect people, the way we conduct our politics now. And you can see it on both sides now, Democrats and Republicans,” the former CBS host said.
“This is not the way that we ought to be electing people, and these are not campaigns that are about what they ought to be about. I think it all goes back to the way that money has now overwhelmed our political system. People used to get into politics because they wanted to change things, or they wanted to do something,” he added.
He said many candidates only run so they can eventually leverage political office into something bigger and more lucrative.
“And it just didn’t use to be that way,” Schieffer said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Schieffer explained what he meant when he said in a separate interview in July that the press “wasn’t skeptical enough” when Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008.
“I don’t really think that reporters had the kid gloves on with Barack Obama, but he was new, and he was exciting and he was a great story, and he made a great speech,” he said.
“And I think people didn’t question how’s he going to get these things done, how will he be at getting coalitions together, how well did he get along with people in the Senate while he was there, those kinds of questions. I think we probably should have been more skeptical, but he was such a good story,” he added.
