Each leader has increasingly leaned on TV and radio appearances to shape the ongoing debate over the implementation of the $2.7 trillion in rescue funding already approved and the looming debate on next steps.
For Pelosi, it’s a chance to be repetitive, literally, on the key issue of medical science driving the response to the health crisis and reopening the economy.
“So, science, science, science. Again, we have to have a calibration. It has to be factually based, scientifically, evidence-based as to what the prospect is of opening up certain businesses and the rest,” Pelosi said Wednesday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” show.
At almost the exact same time, McConnell called in to Fox Radio to tout his demand that next legislative steps include protections for businesses from lawsuits, likening members of Congress to health-care responders and grocery store clerks who are at their “duty stations” as essential workers.
“It’s essential for senators to carefully man ours and support those folks who are out there on the front lines,” he said.
All told, over the past two weeks, Pelosi has appeared on 15 nationally broadcast news shows, according to her office. Including news conferences in the Capitol and conference calls with the media, Pelosi has put herself into the news cycle every day but once since April 19.
McConnell has made six national TV and radio appearances, with another nine hits on radio shows back in Kentucky, where he faces reelection in November, according to his aides. Add in Capitol Hill news conferences and speeches from the Senate floor, and McConnell got to air his views at least nine days in that same timespan.
These appearances fit the personalities of Pelosi, 80, whose sense of imagery turned her many clashes with President Trump into viral social media moments, and McConnell, 78, who has mastered the technique of only speaking when he wants to, regularly walking past the congressional press corps as if he cannot hear questions shouted at him.
Pelosi has almost always chosen televised appearances. She has sometimes used basic video hookups to beam in from different parts of her San Francisco home, while her Washington appearances always happen from a media setup in the Russell Senate Office Building.
McConnell, on the other hand, simply lets his words do the talking.
He always calls in on the phone, usually from his Capitol Hill townhouse, where he has hunkered down for most of the past two months. He has not visually appeared on a TV news interview since early March.
Each side believes the other has committed its share of mistakes.
Democrats note that McConnell is talking to a limited audience — every national appearance he did in April came on a Fox outfit or some other conservative radio show. They believe he committed a grave political mistake on April 22 when he told a radio host that state and local governments might have to file for bankruptcy.
Republicans hammered away at Pelosi after an April 14 appearance on “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” when she tried to be funny for the CBS show. In front of two massive refrigerators, she showed how much chocolate ice cream she stored in her refrigerator — in a way GOP activists said backed up their critique of her as an out of touch wealthy liberal.
But advisers to Pelosi and McConnell believe the increased media exposure has been worth those hits, part of their plan to fill a void as Congress has been mostly shuttered since late March.
Pelosi has spoken on a regular basis with Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, according to her advisers. She coordinates both her policy ideas and messaging strategy with the former vice president, who has been stuck in his Delaware basement doing social media appearances but very few TV interviews.
In this regard, Pelosi has served as the lead Democrat attacking Trump’s handling of the crises, while Biden sticks to the higher ground of talk about unity.
“The president is asking people to inject Lysol into their lungs and Mitch is saying that states should go bankrupt,” Pelosi said at an April 23 news conference in the Capitol.
She also used a Thursday morning CNN appearance to forcefully defend Biden from the allegation that he sexually assaulted a Senate aide in 1993, an accusation he has denied. “He’s the personification of hope and optimism for our country. And I was proud to endorse him,” Pelosi said, adding that she believed his aides’ denial of knowing about the allegation.
McConnell uses his appearances to point the direction for other Senate Republicans — as well as Trump and some of his senior advisers.
The GOP leader took grief for his comments about state and local funding, but that began the morning after the Senate passed a $484 billion rescue plan. The president was already talking about another big bill including funds for those nonfederal governments and a massive infrastructure plan.
Over the next seven days McConnell did four appearances on Fox News or Fox radio. “Before we make that decision, we’re going to weigh the impact of what we’ve already added to the national debt,” he told Fox News on April 22.
In recent days Trump has drawn closer to McConnell’s thinking on the next bill.
And Monday, as the District of Columbia remains under a stay-at-home order, McConnell is reconvening the Senate, returning to an office he has worked from less than a handful of days since late March, aides said.
He and Pelosi issued a rare joint statement Saturday declining the Trump administration’s offer of new rapid tests for preemptively testing lawmakers, saying the tests should be for workers on the front line of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Pelosi has delayed the House’s return because health experts worry about the impact of gathering the current 429 members, forcing them to travel back and forth across the country.
Yet Pelosi can’t get enough of the Capitol. She spent four days in her office this past week, a short trip from the Russell building for TV appearances.
She flew home to San Francisco on Thursday night, her fifth cross-country flight since mid-March. Pelosi is expected back in the Capitol this coming week, likely to continue her media campaign against Trump.
“This president has presided over the worst disaster in our country’s history, an assault on the lives and the livelihoods of the American people,” she told MSNBC on Tuesday.
