by David Shuster
The attorney general of Michigan — the person who runs law enforcement in one of the two or three states that decides who wins the White House — says she will not walk into her own party’s nominating convention this month. Dana Nessel isn’t citing a scheduling conflict. She says she doesn’t feel safe. “The threats that I receive are almost exclusively anti-Semitic threats,” she says. “People aren’t interested in the fact that I’m gay. They’re not interested in the fact that I’m a woman. It’s just been getting worse and worse and worse.” Sit with that for a second. A sitting statewide official, a Democrat, is telling you she expects to be chased, harassed, and shouted off the stage by Democrats — and the thing she expects it for isn’t a vote she cast or a policy she holds. It’s who she is.
David Shuster traces how it got here: the Ann Arbor prosecutions, the ugly public break with Rashida Tlaib, the pressure campaign that ended with the charges dropped, and the endorsement convention where Jewish candidates were shouted down. Then he does the thing nobody else bothered to do — he checked. A search of cable transcripts turns up no coverage of Nessel’s comments on CNN or MS NOW. Not the New York Times. Not Politico. And he asks the question that should make every editor in the country uncomfortable: if a Republican statewide officeholder announced they were too afraid of their own base to attend their convention, and the harassment tracked their identity rather than their politics, would that story have run for a week? You already know the answer. Watch the whole thing — it’s under seven minutes, and the last ninety seconds are the part people will be arguing about.
Cliff’s Note: Here’s a story you didn’t see on CNN this week: the attorney general of Michigan says she’s too afraid to walk into her own party’s convention. David Shuster checked the transcripts to see who covered it. Nobody did. Not the Times, not Politico, not a single cable hit.
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—Cliff
