Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake told CNN on Tuesday that
candidate George W. Bush "just didn't pay a high enough price" in the
2000 election for his DUI arrest that occurred more than 20 years prior.
Blake was talking about famous "October surprises," or unforseen events
occurring in the month before the election that could be game-changing.
The Bush DUI revelation was a hit job [1] planted by a Democratic source that mushroomed into a big story because of the liberal media.
[Video below. Audio here [2].]
"But how was he [Bush] able to overcome that story so close to the
election?" anchor Brooke Baldwin asked on Tuesday afternoon. Blake
answered that " he didn't really overcome it. He just didn't pay a high
enough price."
Regardless of whether he meant that Bush didn't suffer enough for the
DUI or the fallout wasn't "high enough" to cost him the election,
Blake's words definitely made it seem that Bush had to suffer for his
crime from decades earlier, and didn't suffer enough in his opinion.
Blake has been hostile to conservatives on multiple occasions during
this election cycle, most notably when he had the gall to ask Twitter
followers for any dirt [3] on Newt Gingrich. The MRC's Brent Bozell excoriated [4] Blake's tactics as part of a "character assassination."
A transcript of the segment, which aired on October 9 on CNN Newsroom at 3:39 p.m. EDT, is as follows:
BROOKE BALDWIN: And now we jump all the way, October, 2000, news broke
George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving. Granted, that had
happened way back in the '70's. But how was he able to overcome that
story so close to the election?
AARON BLAKE, columnist, "The Fix": Well, you know, he didn't really
overcome it. He just didn't pay a high enough price. Everybody will
recall, of course, that he actually lost the popular vote in that race,
even though he won the electoral vote. Whereas he was up by about five
points before that story broke, so I think it's pretty clear that that
cost him some votes, but it didn't cost him quite enough to actually
cost him the election.
-- Matt Hadro is a News Analyst at the Media Research Center