With this announcement it sounds as if Team Romney finally is getting it’s political act together: Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his Veep pick Rep. Paul Ryan will appear on CBS’ 60 Minutes tonight:
CBS News chief Washington correspondent and anchor of “Face the Nation” Bob Schieffer will sit down with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan Sunday for their first interview since the Republican presidential nominee announced Ryan as his running mate.
The joint interview, to be taped in High Point, N.C., will air Sunday at 7 p.m. Eastern on “60 Minutes.”
reasons why this is important:
1. The announcement about Ryan got lots of new and old media coverage yesterday so this builds on the momentum of the announcement, which will continue to dominate the news.
2. Given his and other GOPers’ current history, you would have expected that the ticket would first appear on Fox News and get softball questions from Republican’s favorite interviewer, de facto partisan p.r. man Sean Hannity. And that would have gotten a lot of mention and also solidified in the minds of some voters the image of a ticket that’s narrow in appeal.
3. Schieffer is a superb newsman, a protege of the late Walter Cronkite and, I have long maintained, the person who should have replaced Cronkite. He isn’t another ideologue or partisan who interviews candidates he’s trying to elect by tossing softball questions or questions aimed at making them look good. He’s trying to extract information from them.
4. The show will get huge ratings.
5. The interview allows the new political team to try and define themselves before a large number of views of many ages and political persuasions to offset the onslaught of definition that will come their way from Camp Obama.
Overall? A smart political move indicating Romney-Ryan intends to try and take its message beyond Fox News, Rush and conservative bloggers.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.