CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash was honored at the Moment Magazine luncheon at the Yale Club in New York this afternoon with the magazine’s “Creativity Award.”
Bash sat down with the magazine’s editor, Nadine Epstein, and participated in a very timely discussion about the Brett Kavanaugh–Dr. Christine Ford hearings, set to take place tomorrow, and shared her thoughts about women in congress.
The veteran CNN journalist was asked about her experience covering the 1991 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings:
“I went to college in Washington and my very first internship was at CBS News and it was during the Clarence Thomas hearings. I remember people thought that Clarence Thomas was going to have lunch at the Palm in D.C. and, as an intern, my job was to literally go to the Palm and sit there and see if he’d come out.”
Commonalities between the Thomas hearing and what we should expect from tomorrow’s hearing:
“It didn’t even dawn on the all-male Senators in 1991 that [all men asking questions to Anita Hill] was going to be a problem or that the questions they were going to ask – which turned out to be totally tone deaf, some of them not all of them, would be a problem and look at today. Because this is a #MeToo missile that just landed at the U.S. Senate, the all-male Republicans recognized that this is a big problem and, while controversial, they made the political move to hire an outside attorney – a woman that is an expert and has won awards for convicting sex crimes. But on the democratic side, unlike in 1991, there are four women Senators, and at least two of whom are experienced prosecutors, these are people who have done this for a living and it’s a completely different dynamic aside from the obvious cultural touch stone and movement.”
On what the next Congress will look like in terms of diversity and gender equity:
“There is no question that there will be a historic number of women elected to Congress because it’s happening in both parties. Absolutely going to be, regardless of who takes control of the House and Senate, it’s going to be most diverse congress in both of gender and minorities across the board.”
