Erin Burnett Did Not Appear to Understand the Conversation

I am rarely able to stomach watching Erin Burnett OutFront, but for whatever reason, I decided to sit through yesterday evening's (May 8, 2012) episode of the show.  And once again I was reminded of why it is such a challenge for me sit for that hour watching CNN - Erin Burnett is terrible at hosting this show.

During one segment of the episode in question, Burnett and her panel were discussing the Indiana Republican U.S. Senate primary that was taking place that day.  Early on in the segment, Burnett discussed the fact that longtime Republican Senator Richard Lugar appeared on the verge of losing in the primary to a Tea Party backed opponent.  (A rough transcript of the entire episode appears here.)  After showing a campaign advertisement that was run against Lugar during the campaign, Burnett made some comments alluding to the disappearance of moderates and the dwindling incidence of compromise in Washington, D.C. politics before introducing her panel of guests.

Her guests were John Avlon, listed as a CNN contributor and a chief speechwriter for former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Hogan Gidley, listed as a former director of communications for former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, and James Carville, listed as a CNN political contributor and a political strategist/advisor for many Democratic campaigns, including Bill Clinton's successful 1992 campaign.

Now, her discussion with her guests started with a conversation about the divided nature of Washington, moved on to a few points about the strength of the Tea Party, considering that the movement had appeared to have been successful in defeating a longtime incumbent Senator, before finally moving on to a discussion of the likely general election match-up between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and in particular, a column that Carville had recently written discussing the race.

From here I'll go to the rough CNN transcript, and I have added the emphasis:

BURNETT: You wrote an op-ed today though talking about something that I think we have all been hearing. A lot of people have been saying sort of and you know (INAUDIBLE) oh Barack Obama has this.

CARVILLE: Yes.

BURNETT: He is going to win this. And you said let me just make it clear this is you and not me. "What are you smoking? What are you drinking? What are you snorting or just what in the hell are you thinking?"

CARVILLE: Right. Who could look at the world and not just the United States. United States in 2008, United States in 2010, everywhere in the world look what happened in Britain, Cameron lost an election. In Germany Merkel was losing. Look what happened in France. Look what happened in Greece. Look what happened everywhere in the world.

What incumbent would be confident in this environment? Except for some reason the U.S. Democrats have -- and I think it -- you know it has to do with like how bad the Republicans are, but you know in the end that's not -- we got to get -- we got to tighten up here. This thing is not -- is nowhere near in the bag. It's a really tough election and they're raising (INAUDIBLE) lobbyists, but not tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in this election and we're just not anywhere near aggressive enough.

BURNETT: Hogan, what do you make of this though? I mean considering that obviously Rick Santorum was more conservative than Mitt Romney, so when it came to who was getting the nomination for the Republican Party it was not the most conservative person, which is a little bit different than what we're seeing tonight in Indiana.

GIDLEY: Right, well I mean every race is different. And you know it didn't have any name ID. He was virtually unknown. He had no money compared to Mitt Romney, so those are a lot of factors that led up to the suspension of the campaign. There's no doubt about that.

I mean Mitt Romney just did this a few years ago, but you know I think on a larger scale and James alluded to some of this earlier, but you know I mean this is going to be a dog fight. There is going to be a ton of money spent in this race, something like we have never seen and don't forget even in this cycle, I mean you're talking about, even in 2010 it wasn't this bad with Twitter and Facebook and things, the emergence of the social media that is -- it is just every second something is going on with these candidates.

And every word is parse like it never has been before and this is going to be one of the most interesting and historical races of our lifetime not just because of the two sides, but just because of everything that is going to be going on under the surface that we all care about that it's going to be interesting to see what we care about every day. And what the average person cares about who is watching this at arm's length and won't get involved until after the summer. 

CARVILLE: I wonder how many tens of millions of dollars in negative ads Mitt Romney and his Super PAC dumped on Rick Santorum. I mean they never let -- they never had a discussion about ideology. They just went in and every time that they went they just croaked with negative ads. And Santorum looked at Pennsylvania and said this guy is going to dump another five or six million. I mean this is a man to go negative in a second. And again he has the whole pollution lobby sitting there ready to fund him and Democrats are sitting there being confident.

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: It makes utterly no sense to me.

BURNETT: Well you got George Soros throwing millions of dollars in now. You are going to get negativity from both sides.

Now I direct you to the last two to three statements (ignoring the crosstalk) that I have bolded and italicized.  This shows just how awful Burnett is.  She appears at the end to have completely forgotten what the subject of the conversation was.  Carville points out his belief that the Romney campaign and his supporters are likely to pump millions of dollars into the effort to defeat President Obama, and Burnett's response was, "Well you got George Soros throwing millions of dollars in now.  You are going to get negativity from both sides."

I'm not going to try to debate whether Burnett's statement is true, because it is almost assuredly true.  The problem with the statement is not whether it is true, but that it is not in any way relevant in the context of the conversation.  It is a complete non sequiter.  Carville was saying that his op-ed was about the cockiness that he perceived to be coming from Democrats, their belief that President Obama is a shoe-in for victory in November.  But his points in this discussion of the op-ed were that basically there are no guarantees in politics (he alludes to other recent political races around the world) and that Governor Romney and his supporters won't hesitate to spend millions of dollars on negative ad campaigns (he gives examples of what happened with the Romney primary races against Santorum) during the general election.  Importantly, the point that Carville was making was that Democrats needed to wake up and realize that this race is not over and Obama is not just going to be handed the victory.  But then Burnett responds, "Well, you got George Soros throwing millions of dollars in now.  You are going to get negativity from both sides."

Vacuous statements like this force me to question whether Burnett is qualified to host a serious news program and reinforces my general decision not to waste an hour daily watching this nonsense.