Kavanaugh-Ford hearing was 8 hours of fighting, and everybody lost
Television unites us, even when we wish it wouldn’t. It was predictably all but impossible to avoid coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s questioning of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who alleges that Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were high school students in 1982. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and most of the major networks had their panels of experts and analysts seated and ready to speculate across multiple platforms more than an hour before the hearings were scheduled to begin. Only ABC (in New York, at least) chose to eschew the pre-game chatter for their regularly scheduled hour of Live! With Kelly and Ryan. Kevin Hart’s Night School is not going to promote itself, after all.
For the first half of the day, the spotlight was also on another woman with a thankless job: Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona sex crimes prosecutor who questioned Dr. Ford on behalf of the Republicans on the committee. Polite and professional, no-nonsense and unflappable, Mitchell queried Dr. Ford on multiple topics — the location of her childhood home, her fear of flying, her conversations with Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, the polygraph exam she underwent in August — all the while gently (so gently!) trying to raise the specter of a Democratic conspiracy against Judge Kavanaugh. A little too gently for Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. “So far Rachel Mitchell hasn’t laid a glove on her!” he marveled during one of the breaks in testimony. While most of the commentators found Mitchell’s line of questioning — a puzzling mix of the hyper-specific and vaguely banal — less than effective, at the very least it spared Dr. Ford from the clumsiness of senators like Orrin Hatch, who referred to her during a hallway press huddle as an “attractive” witness. “That’s exactly why you don’t want these guys questioning her,” sighed an exasperated Dana Bash on CNN.
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Five hours later, when Judge Kavanaugh finally made his opening statement, the tonal shift in the room was nothing less than seismic. “This confirmation process has become a national disgrace!” bellowed Kavanaugh, his voice as loud and assured as Dr. Ford’s was soft and shaky. He veered from palpable anger to tearful despair and back again, accusing the Democrats on the committee for seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” while weepily recalling his 10-year-old daughter’s sweet, heartbreaking suggestion that her family should “pray for the woman.”
It was a display of outrage matched (perhaps surpassed?) by the senators who proceeded to question him, though many directed that animus at each other — as when Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina had what can best be described as a partisan coronary. “What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life!” he raged at his Democratic colleagues. “Boy, y’all want power! God, I hope you never get it.” The reaction to Kavanaugh’s fury-filled opening statement and Graham’s apoplectic mid-hearing meltdown served as a case study for Megyn Kelly’s “worldview” theory: On Fox News, anchors called the judge’s statement “forceful and emotional.” CNN’s Symone Sanders, meanwhile, said to her it sounded “unhinged.”
As the day wore into night and the hearings devolved further and further into a series of partisan snipe-fests about who asked for an FBI investigation when, the gravity and ugliness of the proceedings began to take its toll on the NBC News team. “I feel like something is permanently broken in our politics,” said Andrea Mitchell gravely. “I feel sick to my stomach.”
Across the table, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd wondered, “Where do we go tomorrow?”
