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New Day

Democrats Officially Nominate Joe Biden for President; Hundreds Test Positive amid Chaotic College Re-Openings. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired August 19, 2020 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[07:00:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: We want to welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is New Day.

And Joe Biden is now officially the Democratic presidential nominee. His wife, Jill, making the case for her husband by highlighting what she calls his compassion and humanity at last night's convention.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JILL BIDEN, JOE BIDEN'S WIFE: The burdens we carry are heavy. And we need someone with strong shoulders. I know that if we entrust this nation to Joe, he will do for your family what he did for ours, bring us together and make us whole, carry us forward in our time of need, keep the promise of America for all of us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Former President Bill Clinton also speaking last night with a blistering take on President Trump's leadership. And there were many poignant moments. A video message narrated by Cindy McCain, the widow of the late senator, warmly recalling their 30-year friendship with the Bidens.

And there was this virtual cross-country roll call, featuring voters representing all 50 states and their diversity.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: All right. Tonight, we hear from Senator Kamala Harris, the first woman of color on a major presidential ticket, and former President Barack Obama. You're going to expect a passionate plea to Biden supporters, navigate all the complications and obstacles in place and make sure to get out and vote.

All right, joining us now, CNN Political Analyst David Gregory and Astead Herndon. What we saw last night was very interesting. We saw Jill Biden talking about love and struggle and what we're all going through with the pandemic. The quiet is heavy. You saw outreach to Republicans. You heard from Colin Powell. You heard from Cindy McCain. And, Astead, we also had calamari. We had this remarkable roll call from all 50 states and seven territories. What is it that you think was accomplished last night?

ASTEAD HERNDON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes. I think the goal of last night, kind of an overarching theme of what we're going to see throughout this convention, is projecting Joe Biden not only as a kind of competent government leader who can pull the levers of government in the way President Trump has not, but also as a decent person, as a good man. They're trying to show a contrast in humanity that they think can appeal to voters across the spectrum.

And it think it's an interesting play from Democrats to say, we may have ideological differences, we may not agree on policy, but Joe Biden is someone we can agree on as a better person than Donald Trump. And I think you saw that last night. That's what the montage from Cindy McCain has to say. That is what you get from even progressives, like AOC or Ady Barkan speaking passionately about healthcare.

These are people who have clear differences on the solutions that the country needs. But what they are saying in unison, and I think this is going to be a through line even tonight as we go forward, is that what Joe Biden brings is a level of competence that the American people can agree on.

CAMEROTA: David, you've covered a bunch of DNCs, as we all have. What did you think was particularly effective or ineffective last night?

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I'm struck over the last couple nights how well I think it's actually working to package it up this way. I didn't know that it would feel they're compelling watch. And there are definitely times when it feels like just a commercial. But with that comes a little bit more discipline and more organization, more brevity, like from former President Clinton, and I think that works.

I think that the overarching themes are Joe Biden is a nice guy, he's a normal guy, he's a warm guy, he's a competent guy, and, you know, that sense of normalcy is the real contrast. I think he's older. There are Democratic generational and ideological risks within the Democratic Party that were mostly papered over last night with a nod toward, you know, Biden's generation. But I think those other themes are what are really important right now to project.

BERMAN: It's aggressive, weaponized normalcy in certain ways. And, really, I mean, I think you're both on to something there.

I want to play Jacqueline Brittany, who is a security guard at a paper you're familiar, Astead, The New York Times, who rode up in an elevator with Joe Biden when he was going to meet with your editorial board, not getting the endorsement, but he had this poignant moment with her in the elevator and they've remained close. Just listen to what she says.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JACQUELINE BRITTANY, THE NEW YORK TIMES SECURITY GUARD: In the short time I spent with Joe Biden, I could tell he really saw me, that he actually cared, that my life meant something to him. And I knew, even when he went into his important meeting, he would take my story in there with him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: I played that, just because, in many ways, that was the same message you heard from Cindy McCain, the same message you heard from Colin Powell, the same message

you heard from Jill Biden, you heard from Jacqueline Brittany, a security guard. So that was last night, Astead.

What's left to do? What do the Democrats need to do tonight with Kamala Harris and former President Obama?

HERNDON: I think they have made the case in terms of that kind of aggressive normalcy, as you mentioned. I think what we're going to see over the next few nights is excitement. They want voters to look forward and actually feel kind of not just better about this ticket than Donald Trump, but actually excited about going to the polls and voting.

I think that starts tonight. I think what senator Harris can bring to the ticket is enthusiasm and a sense of the Democratic Party that is not Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or John Kerry's Democratic Party, but one that looks and feels differently. And I think that she's going to make that case starting tonight.

And I think that it's going to culminate with a Joe Biden speech on Thursday that is going to be more -- that is going to be about more than decency. It's going to be about more than just for moving Donald Trump. He needs to kind of create an ethos that he is not just a transitional president but one that will actually respond to the crisis that are currently facing America.

I think the case has been made, frankly, about, do you want to not think about government anymore in the same dramatic ways in which we've thought about it in the last four years. Now, it will be about, can this ticket move the country forward?

CAMEROTA: Talk about aggressive normalcy and relatability. There was this picture that Kamala Harris' husband, a photograph, took of her listening to the roll call. And, I mean, the reason that I remark on it is because people so carefully manage their social media images. They manicure them. I mean, it's supposed to show you behind the curtain, but you're perfectly coifed.

BERMAN: You left Twitter, you canceled Twitter.

BERMAN: Yes, that's true. But, I mean, on all of social media, people try to be very careful about what they look like.

And here is this moment of her totally unvarnished, listening to the roll call in her college sweatshirt. So what case do you think she needs to make tonight? What should we expect?

GREGORY: Well, I really agree. I think it's about excitement and it's an interesting mix of what Joe Biden is trying to pull off here. Because what he's saying to the country is, look, I'm not really the future. I'm much more the past. But we need to get back to a little bit of normal here. We need a break from all of the tumult in our politics and in our country. Let's have a transitional time where we can just take a breath.

And at the same time, I'm also a guy who chooses Kamala Harris, who wants to continue this arc of history that Barack Obama started, so get excited about where the party is going and who the future leadership is.

And I expect that President Obama can capture the excitement, not just motivation, they're one in the same, but excitement about, hey, be excited about this ticket and begin to address the very -- the differences in the party, the progressive wing of the party that is going to play a bigger role than perhaps the time that AOC got last night in front of the convention. So I think we're going to see that future look tonight.

BERMAN: We have a special guest star who just parachuted in to be part of this discussion. Ana Navarro joins us now. Ana, it is --

ANA NAVARRO, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It's called Hispanic time, making an entrance.

BERMAN: Ana, welcome. You're welcome anytime, early, on time, late, whenever you would like. Listen --

NAVARRO: Well, I was just listening to Alisyn say that, you know, that social media is manicured. That might be her social media, but quarantine has brought out an entirely new level of social media. You obviously missed me with my gray roots and muumuus.

CAMEROTA: I have been watching you, Ana. And you're right, quarantine is actually making everybody more authentic. And so that was my point. So we've just got this very authentic glimpse of her on her sofa, and will we see some of that tonight?

BERMAN: I just wish that at some point, Ana, would let people know how she really feels about anything.

And so let's start with -- because you were a John McCain supporter, you were part of the John McCain campaign in 2008. And there are certain things now, I suppose, we come to expect in this world of Donald Trump. But it is remarkable when the wife of the 2008 nominee is part of a campaign video at the opposing party's convention. So let's listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CINDY MCCAIN, WIFE OF FORMER SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: It was a style of legislating and leadership that you don't find much anymore.

And when millions of Americans were faced with leading their health insurance, it was Joe's friend that saved Obamacare by crossing the aisle.

[07:10:07]

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: McCain cast his vote with a thumbs down. JOE BIDEN (D), PRESUMPTIVE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE: John and I have been given several awards about bipartisanship. We don't understand why you should get an award for bipartisan.

JOHN MCCAIN, FORMER SENATOR: Thank you for your example and how to remain the same good guy that you were when you first got here, most of all, for your friendship. My life and the lives of many have been enriched by it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: That last part, Ana, to hear, thank you for your friendship. My life and the lives of so many have been enriched by it. To hear that from John McCain felt like an endorsement of sorts. How did it hit you?

NAVARRO: It made me very emotional. Hearing John McCain's voice, which I think has been so missed in the political discourse, it's been missed in the Republican Party, it's been missed in America, his leadership, his ability to stand up to injustice and to confront Donald Trump and abuses of power. And so to hear him in his own words, hear his voice, and see him be part of this was, for me, a very emotional moment.

Tomorrow is John McCain's birthday. So I know these are difficult days for Cindy and the family. His anniversary of death is also in a few days. And I am thankful to Cindy McCain for setting the tone of putting country over party and of keeping John McCain's legacy alive. I suspect she thought this is what he would have wanted.

And, look, you know, this is about values. This is about America. This is about patriotism. And John McCain and Joe Biden have worked together, worked together for so many decades. And it was about introducing Joe Biden, because we take for granted that there are people who don't know him, right?

It almost feels like all of America has his cell phone and gets phone calls from Joe Biden, helping them through grief and helping them through obstacles and just calling to say, to check in. But there are people who don't know him. And it helped to remember what civility was once like in American politics. It doesn't have to be what it is today, what is promoted by Donald Trump.

CAMEROTA: Astead, I mean, the DNC has done a really interesting job of having all of these Republican voices, you know, John McCain from beyond, as well as Colin Powell, I mean, John Kasich. We could go down the list. And so do you think that's effective and do you think that the progressives have a point, as some have mentioned on social media, that their voices are not being as amplified?

NAVARRO: Look, conventions serve two purposes, right? To make people feel good and to make people feel slighted. It's about highlighting an agenda, it's about pumping people up, driving up excitement, you know, introducing the candidate. But there will always be people who feel there's not enough of us on the screen. We need more time. You're working with two hours of primetime a night and a lot of that is taken up by procedural things like the roll call that we saw yesterday and was very representative and marvelous.

You know, as a disenfranchised Republican, who refuses to vote for Donald Trump and is going to vote for Joe Biden, I have felt the water is warm. And I think they have really worked on trying to make it feel inclusive.

And, look, we all have to learn the lessons of 2016. There were people who sat out the election or who voted for Jill Stein or who voted for Governor Gary Johnson because Hillary didn't fill their love tank or because they had supported somebody else in the primary and wanted to cast a protest vote or a symbolic vote.

Well, that symbolism and that protest helped us get Donald Trump. And we've had a four-year buyer's remorse. And so I hope that the lesson for everyone who wants to get rid of Donald Trump as president and sees him as an existential threat to America is that it is all hands on deck.

And I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was very significant to that last night. She had a wonderful tweet endorsing Joe Biden, saying, I'm ready to work with you and explaining what her role in the convention was. And I thought it was very, very gracious by her last night. It's time for unity.

BERMAN: Astead, that question was to you, we have about 30 seconds left. I don't know if you want to weigh in.

NAVARRO: Oh, I'm sorry.

BERMAN: No, no.

CAMEROTA: It was worth it.

BERMAN: We're happy to have you. At least early, on time, or late, we're happy to have you.

NAVARRO: I'm a woman who hasn't been out of her hours. Listen, I haven't been out of my house in so long, I'm just excited.

CAMEROTA: That's awesome.

BERMAN: Astead, it's now ten seconds, go ahead.

HERNDON: I mean, I think I agree with everything that was said. I think I would also say, this is a culmination of Joe Biden's political career. He works with Republicans. He crosses the aisle. If you're going to expect a convention that does not reflect that, progressives should have nominated their chosen candidates.

[07:15:01]

This is what the Democratic Party under Joe Biden will be.

CAMEROTA: David, we also want to hear last words from you, but I'm sure Ana will take it. Go ahead.

GREGORY: No, I think --

NAVARRO: white men are highly overrated.

GREGORY: I think the larger point is to say to the country that a lot of Republicans that you may know and have known for decades are not part of this Republican Party, that there's something really wrong here. And that, again, I keep going back to the same place, let's take a pause, let's transition back to what feels like a more normal time. Whatever our differences, and there's still a lot of differences in politics, can we get back to something that looks like regular order? That's what this convention seems like to me.

BERMAN: All right. David Gregory, Astead Herndon --

CAMEROTA: And Ana Navarro, we really need to see you more often. Thank you all very much.

NAVARRO: Very happy to be out of my house today.

CAMEROTA: We can see that.

BERMAN: All right, this morning, we are getting more news about the coronavirus pandemic, more news about colleges that had opened reversing course. We'll give you the new details on that, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:20:00]

CAMEROTA: College campuses reporting nearly 1,000 cases of coronavirus across the country as students try to return to campus. Now, some universities are reversing their reopening plans.

Joining us now is CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

So, Sanjay, so Notre Dame -- I'll just go through the list of what we know as of this morning. Notre Dame moving to online instruction, Ithaca, extending remote learning through the whole fall semester, Michigan state's president telling students who had planned to live in campus housing to stay home, University of North Carolina going all online. I could go on.

I mean, was this bound to happen or did they make immediate mistakes or what?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think it was bound to happen, I mean, unfortunately. This is like one of those things where we know that there is a virus spreading. The virus is behaving exactly the way that you think the virus would behave. It's very contagious. It's unforgiving.

And, you know, what else is behaving exactly the way you think it would is college students. College students are behaving exactly the way you would expect them to behave. They're coming back to campus for the first time. They generally know the rules, but they want to get together. I mean, so I think it's very hard in the middle of a pandemic to reopen colleges and schools. It's challenging and we haven't done the things necessary in order to make that happen in the first place. So, you know, I use the body metaphor, as you know, Alisyn. The virus has spread. The body has become more infected and now we're sort of wondering why things can't just be back to normal. We've got to treat this before we can go back to that.

BERMAN: So, here is the thing, Sanjay. Because if you look at daily cases, they are going down in the United States, hospitalization also going down, and that's all a very good thing. What I do wonder though is if what we're going to see is what we saw in the spring when states and cities gab to open up to an extent, let people go to restaurants and bars and all of a sudden cases started to rise.

So, schools, the schools that are opening and seeing these clusters, we've heard from many of our experts. Professor Haseltine say that opening schools -- Osterholm -- if you open schools, it is going to fuel an increase in cases and fuel a spike. How much of a concern should that be?

GUPTA: I mean, I think that is a huge concern. I mean, you know, we have -- this is one of these things now where we're trying to look at this as a nation, but also people are looking at this within their own communities and their own homes. And we made the decision, as you well know, not to send our kids back to school for that very reason. It's going to fuel this.

We know kids, especially older kids, can transmit this virus very easily, even if they're not getting as sick. The numbers will go up. There will become more people who are infected as a result of these decisions. There will become more people who are hospitalized as a result of these decisions, and more people who will die. I mean, we had -- we've seen this pattern over and over again.

And we can look at what's happening overall with the number of newly infected people in this country, and you have seen sort of this significant peak in April, as you remember, and then a downward sort of flow for some time. June 11th, I believe, was the lowest day in this country and that was about 17,000 people. And now, you know, our sort of lowest number now is still higher than the peak in April.

It's definitely going to go back up as we start to open things back up. I mean, there's no question about that. We don't have to hypothesize about that anymore. The virus has been very consistent in all this.

And I will point out as well, we were just doing some calculations, but the amount of testing has also gone down in this country. We are doing 880,000 tests back on August 13th and now 640,000 tests were done yesterday. So, fewer -- 200 fewer tests have been done as well, which could also be adding to the numbers going down.

CAMEROTA: Sanjay, one of the things that would allow us to return to normal is airplane travel. Are people feeling comfortable with getting on an airplane? And there's this new reporting in JAMA that talks about, maybe they know a little bit more about how it's spread on airplanes and who is most likely to get infected and whether or not it's safe. What do you know?

GUPTA: Yes. This was a study that came out actually evaluated a situation back in March. And keep in mind, back in March, we were still in a situation where we were still learning more about this virus. There weren't a lot of mitigation methods in place.

[07:25:00]

This was a study that looked at basically a flight that was about four and a half hours long. And what they found was that there were seven infected passengers on this flight. They didn't know they were infected until afterwards. But as they modeled this together, they hypothesized that two people became infected on the flight, they sat across from infected passengers.

And I've got to tell you a few things. One is that we don't know for sure those two infected passengers could have been become infected either right before or right after the flight. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when that infection occurs. Also, this is a time when basic measures, such as masks, such as some physical distancing, things like that, weren't being done on flights.

So, you know, I think if there were going to have been significant outbreaks on airline travel, we would have started to see that. I know the overall number of people traveling has been down and that it's sort of popped back up a bit. We haven't seen these significant outbreaks. So I'm not as worried about airline travel as long as people adopt these basic public health measures, which, by the way, work.

I mean, we talk about this all the time, but this virus can't jump very far, it's pretty easily contained by a mask. On planes, you have more filtration, so the air is re-circulated four times an hour as supposed into most buildings were maybe once or twice an hour. So I'm less worried about airline travel.

BERMAN: All right, Sanjay. Thanks so much for being with us. You're going to be back next hour with some news on one of the vaccines that is being watched most closely in the trials and what's going on in that trial. So that's coming up in just a few minutes. Thanks, Sanjay.

CAMEROTA: Thanks a lot.

GUPTA: You got it.

CAMEROTA: All right. So the Biden campaign is making the case for uniting a deeply divided country. They're featuring several high- profile Republicans to make this case. Will that attract some swing voters to support Biden? A former democratic presidential candidate is going to join us with his thoughts, next.

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