This week at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, operatives from the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump met to discuss the recent election and the coming Trump presidency. The conference, which has occurred every four years since 1972, culminated in a forum featuring Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. CNN’s Jake Tapper moderated the event, which the network will be broadcast on Sunday, Dec. 4, at 9 a.m. and noon. WGBH News political reporter Adam Reilly attended and offered a sneak preview to Bob Seay, host of WGBH’s Morning Edition. A lightly edited transcript follows.
Q. Was it awkward for these two adversaries to share a stage and act civilly toward each other?
A. I felt like I was watching one of those tense holiday meals where there are big, dark disagreements that everyone’s trying not to talk about or acknowledge. They manage to ignore them for a while, but then they bubble up over the course of the conversation — and at the end, they bust out into the open. That’s what happened at the Kennedy School.
Q. We’re not permitted to use any audio from the forum because it’s airing on CNN on Sunday. But can you tell us where, specifically, Conway and Mook disagreed?
A. There was huge disagreement over why Trump won and Clinton lost. According to Conway, Clinton was just a terrible candidate — the word she used was “joyless.” Conway also said Trump succeeded in tapping into the angst of working-class voters in a way that Republicans hadn’t been able to before. She hearkened back to the last campaign, in which Republican nominee Mitt Romney paid a lot of attention to so-called job creators — entrepreneurs and small businesspeople. Conway noted that most people in America aren’t job creators but job holders, and she credited Trump with figuring out how to tap into their concerns.
Mook totally rejected Conway’s characterization of Clinton as joyless. He spent a lot of time talking about that remarkable late-campaign letter from James Comey, the FBI director, which a lot of people took as a de facto re-opening of the investigation into Clinton’s private email server. Mook said that was incredibly damaging. And he talked again and again about hackers, apparently backed by Russia, who managed to steal emails from the Democratic National Committee and [Clinton campaign chair] John Podesta — and then pass them to Wikileaks. He called that a huge liability for the Clinton campaign. And, Mook said, he thinks it was difficult for Clinton to run as, potentially, the first female president — that she was covered in a way men are not.
There was a fascinating exchange in which moderator Jake Tapper tried to get Conway to talk about the effect those hackers may have had. There’s something resembling a national-security consensus that Russia, through hackers, attempted to influence the election. But Conway refused to endorse that conclusion. Tapper pressed her a few times, and she insisted that we just don’t know if that’s the case. That was pretty striking.
Q. Was that where things became heated between Mook and Conway?
A. Things started to get heated there, but they really took off in the Q-and-A session afterward. Conway got multiple questions along the lines of, how can you justify — or did you justify — things Trump said that were widely perceived as offensive to women, or people of color, or Muslims? It was clear she really didn’t like that line of questioning. It was a pro-Clinton crowd, and Conway didn’t appreciate that. At one point, she suggested one of the questioners was being impolite; at another point, she suggested the questioner should be rallying behind the president-elect instead of re-litigating the campaign.
But then a questioner asked Conway about a finding, from the Southern Poverty Law Center, that there have been 1,000 hate incidents since the election. The questioner wanted to know what Trump was going to do to address that. Conway began her reply by saying, well, they’re an anti-Trump group. Mook jumped in — he seemed to be incredulous. He said the Southern Poverty Law Center is a civil-rights advocacy organization with a long and august history.
Then, after Conway said Trump has denounced groups and individuals he’s never met that have attempted to attach themselves to him, Mook objected again. He said Trump needs to speak out more loudly and more clearly when it comes to groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which he noted had endorsed Trump in the campaign. At that, the crowd burst into applause — something they’d been told not to do. It was the only time it happened during the conversation.
