When you lose the hosts of “The View,” perhaps it is time to rethink how you pander to the Democratic base.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., threw out a hunk of red meat to the left wing this week when she announced she had turned down Fox News’ offer to join them for a town hall event to discuss her 2020 campaign. But it does not look like the base is biting, if the reactions of the hosts of the generally Democratic-friendly talk show “The View” are any indicator.
“I think that it’s being very dismissive of so many Americans for her not to go on Fox News,” said host Sunny Hostin.
She added, “I think there is a lot of good journalists there like Chris Wallace, like Shep Smith, and I think that if you want to be president of the United States — for everyone — then you need to speak to everyone.”
Her colleague, Joy Behar, sounded a note of agreement. Behar also pointed out that the president “never goes” on left-leaning networks like MSNBC or CNN, which, in this context, is not a comment that reflects well on Warren.
Yet another host, Whoopi Goldberg, added later, “If you can’t face the Fox audience, you can’t face the U.S. — it’s that simple.”
Warren almost certainly calculated that rejecting Fox News would win her big plaudits from the Democratic base. I doubt the reaction from the hosts of “The View,” which has a sizable audience, is quite what the senator was aiming for when she attacked Fox News as a “hate-for-profit racket.” Instead, she just came off as a bit of a coward. It feels like a massive self-own, along the lines of Warren’s disastrous 2018 DNA test, which showed she has an even flimsier claim to Native American heritage than previously thought.
