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Transcript from CNN’s The Blame Game.
CNN’S ANDERSON COOPER: Good evening. I’m Anderson Cooper and welcome to CNN’s new program The Blame Game. As anyone could tell you, partisanship has been on a precipitous rise in the United States over the past decade. When we look back 30 years, Pew Research shows that only 6 percent of people said that they had negative views of the Democratic and Republican parties. In 2022, that number had risen to 27 percent. If we look at each party individually, neither receives a majority of Americans’ approval.
We want to know: why is this? What has driven such a rise and is there anything we can do to turn the tide?
That is why CNN has developed The Blame Game. We’ve come to realize that most of our roundtable discussions tend to devolve into the very partisan fighting that is at the root of most of our news stories. The Blame Game flips the script. The goal is that if we start with the finger pointing, maybe we can get to a solution. Do I believe that it has the most news value? No, but we’ve tried everything else, so it’s worth a shot, and we can’t solve a problem unless we identify it.
Tonight, we have with us Mason Hounsel and Alberta Nichols, strategists for the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. We are also joined by a live studio audience, representative of ideologies across the political spectrum. At the end of the program, they will have a chance to share their perspectives on the issues at hand.
Thank you all for being here for our inaugural episode.
MASON HOUNSEL: You’re welcome.
ALBERTA NICHOLS: Pleased to be here.
COOPER: In Washington, the primary barrier to passing bills seems to be the extreme difficulty in getting both sides to work together. Whereas legislating used to be built upon compromise, that is now sold as a weakness and a failure by the very Congresspeople whose job it is to get this work done. Who is to blame for that?
HOUNSEL; Well, for that answer, I think we need to look back to when political opponents started labeling each other as enemies. A prime example of this is when back in 2016, Hillary Clinton called supporters of President Trump a “basket of deplorables.”
NICHOLS: (scoffs) First off, it’s former President Trump. Second, do you really believe that’s when our problems with bipartisanship started? I’ll give it to you that the 2016 election was certainly an inflection point, but the sledgehammer came down an escalator in Manhattan. And it began way before that. We saw it in the Obama Administration. Do you not remember when Ted Cruz chose to read Green Eggs & Ham on the Senate floor and shut down the government, rather than to work with Democrats?
HOUNSEL: I believe it was the Democrats who were not willing to work with the Republicans to curb needless spending and address clear issues in Obamacare.
NICHOLS: It wasn’t because of clear issues in the Affordable Care Act. It was because Republicans didn’t want to provide health care to millions of Americans and help them, even though they had no problem giving the rich a hand up. Which, if you want to talk about needless spending, let’s talk about the deficit racked up under the last administration. Trump added, what, $8 trillion, to the federal deficit, and a good portion of that came from the tax breaks he gave to his rich friends.
COOPER: (sighs exasperatedly) Here we go.
NICHOLS AND HOUNSEL CONTINUE TO TALK OVER ONE ANOTHER.
COOPER: Alberta, Mason, let’s hit the pause button for a second.
HOUNSEL AND NICHOLS QUIET DOWN.
COOPER: Thank you. See, this is exactly what we are here to talk about. I asked you all a question, and it turned into instant finger-pointing. Why is that? I think we can all admit that we’re not perfect, and both sides have had their failures.
NICHOLS: I take umbrage with that, Anderson. Yes, Democrats haven’t done everything right, but we aren’t shredding the Constitution to allow a felon-insurrectionist-liar take power and turn our democracy into a dictatorship.
COOPER: There’s certainly evidence that the far-right movement has overtaken the Republican Party, and that has caused alarm bells to sound around the—
HOUNSEL: Really? The Democrats are running a dementia-addled octogenarian so they can rule with their socialist agenda.
NICHOLS: Oh, so because it’s helping people who aren’t millionaires and billionaires, it’s socialism?
HOUNSEL: That’s exactly what it is. You and your woke agenda—
NICHOLS: Woke? (Nichols laughs) Can you please give me a definition of that? Because I think it’s a buzzword you throw around when you have nothing else to say.
HOUNSEL: Like you throw around “authoritarian” and “dictator”?
COOPER: Excuse me, I don’t think this conversation is productive. It’s just exacerbating the problem.
NICHOLS: What was that, Anderson?
HOUNSEL: You know what? Let’s talk about you, Anderson. I heard the idea for The Blame Game was floated by your buddy, Andy Cohen, as a way to boost CNN’s failing ratings.
NICHOLS: Yeah, everything you and the media does is for viewers and numbers and not to actually solve problems. You’re just as much to blame for the partisanship as we are.
COOPER: (flustered) Well, I—
HOUNSEL: Maybe even more to blame, actually. You literally set up these panels and create questions to pit us against each other. I think you’re the real enemy here.
COOPER: And I take offense to that. We’re not the enemy. We, like many news organizations, operate on an ads-based model. We’re a business, too, so of course we have to worry about ratings, but I take my commitment to telling the truth to our audience very seriously.
NICHOLS: Your audience, which has a specific point of view that you cater to. “The truth” is through whatever lens you determine will keep the most eyes on you.
HOUNSEL: Wow, did we just figure out the cause of partisanship?
NICHOLS: Finally something we can agree on.
COOPER: While I’m happy to see a moment of camaraderie between you two, you realize the same argument you made against the media applies to our political parties? Elected officials these days seem more concerned with what will get them donations and attention than actually doing their job.
NICHOLS: Are we really starting this again? Didn’t we just give you what you wanted?
NICHOLS, COOPER, AND HOUNSEL SPEAK OVER ONE ANOTHER. SPEECH IS INDISCERNIBLE.
CADENCE TURNER: Excuse me?
(INDISCERNIBLE SPEECH)
TURNER: Excuse me?
THE ROUNDTABLE QUIETS.
COOPER: Yes, Ms. … Turner. I’m sorry, but the audience comments aren’t until later.
TURNER: I understand, but do you really think that me offering feedback now will really make this any more of an unmitigated dumpster fire than it already is?
COOPER: … That is fair. Please, what would you like to say?
TURNER: I think you’re all to blame.
COOPER: Okay.
HOUNSEL: No, not okay.
TURNER: And I’m to blame too. We’re all to blame. We’re all part of this cycle, right? Politicians do crazy things or just don’t do their job, and it gets media attention, and we see it, and we either like what we’re seeing from one side or we align with the other, and it gets us fired up, and we keep watching, and we donate, and we vote, and the people elected again, and they keep doing it, and we all follow the same pattern. If any of us broke the pattern, it wouldn’t work, but none of us ever do. It’s a—you know those relationships where you feed off each other?
NICHOLS: Symbiotic?
TURNER: Parasitic, actually. I think that if each of us could just take accountability for the role we play in this, we might actually be able to get somewhere. Yes, some of us may have played bigger roles than others, but we’ve all participated.
COOPER: Thank you for that incredibly thoughtful response, Ms. Turner. Maybe we need to rebrand this show and call it The Share the Blame Game.
CLAPPING AND LAUGHTER FROM THE CROWD.
COOPER: Alberta, Mason, is there anything you would like to add?
NICHOLS: I do agree that we all could do with taking a long look in the mirror in seeing how we’re affecting the American ecosystem.
HOUNSEL: Why are you looking at me as you say that?
NICHOLS: No reason. You were just where my eyes went. I meant it for us all.
HOUNSEL: Sure. Well, while I respect Ms. Turner’s right to have an opinion, personally, I think it’s bull. My party is doing the will of the people, we are responding to what the people want, and fighting off attacks from the Left to preserve our country.
TURNER: Really? It’s because you and the Right want to destroy our country.
COOPER: (sighs hard) Well, we’re going to take this opportunity for a commercial break. If you’re lucky, it will be a permanent hiatus. This is Anderson Cooper, and I’m sorry you had to join us for this episode of The Blame Game.
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