Alyssa Farah Griffin Lavishes Praise on Kamala Harris Convention Speech — Compares Her Recent Rhetoric to Mitt Romney’s
ABC’s The View returned for its new season on Tuesday, and co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin seemed to have changed her tune on Vice President Kamala Harris during hiatus.
Griffin was part of former President Donald Trump’s administration but is now a vocal opponent of her former boss. That said, her change of heart about Trump did not automatically make her a fan of the Democratic ticket or President Joe Biden. However, Harris’s speech during the Democratic National Convention reminded Griffin of more level-headed Republican politician:
Griffin: [S]he’s running really smart. I was at the convention for CNN. I closed my eyes at one point and I was like, this could be Mitt Romney speaking! When she talked about supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, standing with Ukraine and allies, she did say she does not–
Joy Behar: Sounds like Biden.
Griffin: She does not support banning fracking. There’s other ways to address climate change, but also care about the energy sector and the jobs that they create. And she’s talking about onshoring American jobs and rebuilding the middle class. So, this is not how she ran in 2020, when she ran on some things that were more to the left. She realizes the majority of this country is closer to the center. Donald Trump’s too far right and too extreme for them. And if she keeps winning this, running this way for the next 60 plus days, I think she can pull it off.
That wasn’t even all the praise Griffin had for Harris. She compared Harris’s policy shifts to her own while she was serving in the Trump administration:
I’m a Republican. I’ve never voted for a Democrat. And I’ve been listening to how she’s campaigning and what she’s talking about to see how could I get there. In the campaign she ran in 2020, I couldn’t be with. She talked about defunding the police. I mentioned banning fracking, the Green New Deal. But now she’s talking differently. And I think this is why: I entered the former administration, where I served in the White House and [Department of Defense] as a lot more far-right than I am now. And then I started getting intel briefings. I started realizing you are a public servant of all Americans, and no one side has all the right, good ideas. If she, and she kind of alluded to this when she sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash, now she has more information and her values haven’t changed but the way to get there has. So, I think that there’s a way that she’s kind of maybe centered during her time in office.
Griffin’s positive opinion of Harris even led Behar to ask if she was going to vote for her. She responded, before she was interrupted by co-host Sunny Hostin: “I want to see more. We’re still a while out, but I’m…”
Watch the video above via ABC.
