CNN’s Alisyn Camerota Mocks Bernie Sanders Debate Moment: ‘He Came Out As a White Guy Last Night!’
CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota mocked a spontaneous debate utterance from Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders by laughingly declaring that he “came out as a white guy last night!”
On Friday mornings edition of New Day, Camerota and co-anchor John Berman conducted a panel on the winners and losers from Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate. CNN commentator and former Hillary Clinton senior advisor Jess McIntosh kicked off the “losers” portion of the program by singling out Sanders’ response to a question about race, and his emphatic declaration of his own whiteness.
McIntosh noted that the debate was an opportunity to reach out to voters disappointed in the absence of candidates like Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro from the stage, but “Instead we saw Bernie Sanders sort of revert to his 2016 race issues, where he got asked a direct question about race and he tried to pivot to climate change and he got called out on that.”
“He made that joke about also being a white guy which fell really flat,” she continued, and Camerota interrupted to joke — in an apparent reference to an earlier remark by Berman — that Sanders “came out as a white guy last night!”
“He did, and it was just the wrong moment to do that when we were all sort of feeling the strain of having what had been a really diverse field winnowed to a very white one, so I would say those were real misses,” McIntosh said, and added “Joe Biden answering the question about reparations by dodging it entirely was another major miss on race last night, when I think race really mattered to the people watching that stage.”
CNN commentator Elaina Plott seemed to sun up the consensus that Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar won the night, pointing out the moment that Klobuchar interceded in the pitched battle between South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren over fundraising.
“It’s hard to be aggressively moderate, right?” Berman chimed in.
“What a perfect slogan that would be, I love that,” Plott said.
“I think it was a great night for both of the women on stage,” McIntosh said, citing Warren’s exchanges with Mayor Pete.
McIntosh also praised Biden for his handling of a question about working with Republicans.
“I thought he answered that question much better than he ever has before last night,” she said. “Usually he talks about how the Republicans are going to have an epiphany and come to the table once Trump isn’t there and I don’t think that that resonates with Democratic primary voters who frankly lived through the Obama administration when that didn’t happen, and so did Vice President Biden.”
“Last night he made it clear that he would try to convince them, and if that failed, he would try to beat them, and I think that’s probably more where more progressive voters are,” McINtosh continued, adding that Biden’s answer stayed “true to himself, which is the guy who wants to get along with everybody, but also recognizing that we are in different political times than we have been previously.”
Watch the clip above via CNN.
