One of the biggest winners of the 2024 election was Scott Jennings. The folksy columnist and former George W. Bush staffer was a dominant force in his role as CNN’s token Republican, regularly holding his own in one-on-five debates with Democrats and journalists who support Democrats.
As a normal American, Jennings often seemed out of place on CNN, mostly because he wasn’t afraid to criticize Democrats but also because of his insightful commentary and because he never lost his cool—or his sense of humor—when his remarks were inevitably met with incredulous screeching. When Jennings wasn’t calling out his onscreen opponents for spouting nonsense, he was making them laugh with his razor-sharp wit and memeable facial expressions.
Jennings was a lonely voice of reason earlier this year, when journalists were still insisting President Joe Biden was fit to serve another four years in office. He slammed Democrats for suggesting that, behind the scenes, they’d seen Biden “do cartwheels and handstands while doing trigonometry while solving all the nation’s problems,” even though “nobody believes that” and most Americans could see that the president “could barely walk up the stairs.” He compared Biden to Colonel Sanders: “His face is on the bucket, he doesn’t make the chicken anymore; in fact, he’s not even alive anymore.”
When Biden dropped out this summer, Jennings was forced to rebut Democrats who celebrated the “organic” enthusiasm for Kamala Harris. “This is the literal most manufactured presidential campaign ever,” he said. “She didn’t even run.” He accurately assessed Harris to be an incompetent candidate. “If she were an animal, she’d be a duck-billed platitude,” he told former Obama adviser David Axelrod. Jennings assailed Harris’s running mate, serial fabulist Tim Walz, for failing to provide a compelling explanation for his lies. “His answer was, essentially, ‘Me no understand words good,'” Jennings said. “I mean, he’s a buffoon.”
The Democratic Party’s condescending attitude was a serious problem, Jennings argued. (It was.) He observed that “a lot of men think Democrats care more about dudes who want to become women than dudes who just want to be dudes.”
Jennings deserves enormous credit for making CNN (almost) watchable again. Apart from Donald Trump, he is the best thing that ever happened to the liberal network.
