Rep. Cantor Blames the Media for the GOP’s Low Approval Ratings

Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:44 pm

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) was on CNN’s The Situation Room today. When host Wolf Blitzer asked Cantor about the Republican Party’s low approval ratings, he blamed the mainstream media for not covering Republicans.

Blitzer asked Cantor, “In this most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, by an almost 2-1 margin, 62 percent to 36 percent, they believe that the president is doing more than the GOP to try to reach some sort of cooperation with the other party. Why does the American public think that the White House and the Democrats are more assertive in wanting to cooperate with you than the Republicans are?”

Cantor answered, “Well, Wolf, I may lay some of the blame back on that — on your colleagues in mainstream media. It’s just not as appetizing, I guess, to cover the plans that we have and the attempts that we’ve made and we’ll continue to make to reach out not only to the president and the White House, but to Speaker Pelosi, who, frankly, has been unwilling to bring a consensus-building group together to try and see a way to bring the agenda back from the extreme to the mainstream. But we’re going to continue trying.”

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It is all the media’s fault. The media made the House Republicans debut a budget that contained no numbers. The media is made the Republican Party turn down the gestures of bi-partisanship that Obama made when he took office. This a ridiculous answer from someone who is supposed to be one of the future stars of the Republican Party. When a political party is as far out of power as the GOP is, they aren’t going to get the same level of coverage as the president.

The reality is that, except for saying no, the GOP has not offered much policy for the media cover. If the Republicans had any sort of real leadership, then the media wouldn’t be focusing on Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann. Cantor broke out the old the mainstream media is against us excuse because he didn’t want to say our strategy for 2010 and 2012 is to say no to everything, cross our fingers, and hope Obama fails. Blaming the media plays well with the base, but those kind of excuses don’t explain why President Obama has owned the GOP.



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