CNN’s Camerota to Deval Patrick on Campaign Launch: ‘We Have a Picture of the Nonexistent Crowd’

Tuesday on CNN’s “New Day,” show co-host Alisyn Camerota expressed her skepticism regarding former Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA) presidential bid, given its early showing.

Camerota asked Patrick “what went wrong” regarding his official announcement at Morehouse College earlier this month.

Partial transcript as follows:

CAMEROTA: Governor, also last week, and I’m sure this is a mild sore spot, you had this event at Morehouse College. We have a picture of the nonexistent crowd that showed up. And so what went wrong here? I mean what — what happened?

PATRICK: Oh, my gosh. We have, you know, we had just a terrific week where I think we just tried to do one thing too many. And our team, you know, I started out in New Hampshire and gone to California and then Nevada and Iowa and South Carolina and we were turning back to Massachusetts by way of Atlanta, D.C. and New York, and we just tried to do one thing too many. We had a — we had two things, including a flight scheduled on top of one another and didn’t realize it until the last possible minute.

So I owe — I have apologized. I do owe the folks at Morehouse another opportunity to come and kick the tires on our campaign and on me, and I promise to do that before too long.

CAMEROTA: But do you think that that is, at all, indicative of the struggle to gain traction at this date and how will you make up for lost time?

PATRICK: Well, so, first of all, this was going to be hard no matter what. Ask any of the candidates who have been campaigning for months and years. It’s still hard. Elections are about persuasion. And it’s about talking about what your vision is and offering people that choice.

I understand that. I’m prepared to do that work. I’m very clear-eyed about it.

I am also careful, by the way, not to let one picture or one experience define a campaign or define an individual. By the way, it’s a bad habit we have to — forget about elections, just in general, it’s a bad habit we have trying to cram people into a box as small as possible so we can flick it off to the side.

I’ve had a whole life of understanding that, you know, none of us fits in a box. None of the pictures we see are as simple or as obvious as they — as they seem. And that ought to matter to the many, many people in this country who feel like they are only seen in a single dimension, if at all.

And certainly that they aren’t understood in the fullness of the challenges and opportunities, they have at a policy level in Washington.

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