The armchair quarterbacking could start as soon as the first excerpt from the interview airs during ABC’s nightly news broadcast early Friday evening: Did Stephanopoulos go too hard on the president, or too soft? If Biden speaks strongly and coherently through the entire interview, will that silence the calls for him to step down?
A big audience is expected for the interview, which was just arranged three days ago. ABC initially planned to air Stephanopoulos’s full, unedited conversation on Sunday, with only teaser clips on Friday, but moved it to Friday amid heightened public interest following Biden’s halting and unfocused performance in last week’s debate against Donald Trump.
Stephanopoulos rose to prominence in 1992 as one of the top staffers for Bill Clinton as he mounted his first run for president. His political celebrity was heightened after the release of “The War Room,” an award-winning documentary on the campaign that centered on the relationship between Stephanopoulos and fellow Clinton operative James Carville.
During that race, Stephanopoulos experienced the production of another make-or-break television interview from a different vantage. In January 1992, the campaign booked Bill and Hillary Clinton for a “60 Minutes” interview to address the infidelity allegations that were then dogging the candidate. In one crucial exchange, Hillary Clinton feistily declared that she was not “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” helping to salvage her husband’s candidacy at the cost of her own image.
“We bet a whole campaign on a single interview,” Stephanopoulos later wrote in his memoir.
After leaving the administration, Stephanopoulos started working at ABC News in 1997, at a time when he was so famous as a celebrity political operative that the New York Times dubbed him the “thinking woman’s sex symbol.”
Since then, Stephanopoulos has become one of ABC News’s leading journalists. He currently appears as a co-anchor on “Good Morning America” and hosts the channel’s Sunday morning political talk show, “This Week.”
He has presided over some of the network’s biggest nights of political coverage, including presidential primary debates and high-profile town halls with both Biden and Trump in 2020.
