Where Does Abby Phillip Go From Here?

Abby Phillip’s breakthrough moment came during those tense, hazy days after the election, when results were still rolling in, election nerds were toggling back and forth between Steve Kornacki and John King, and the networks hadn’t yet called it for Joe Biden. “Can I just say, for Black women, this has been really a proving moment for their political strength,” said Phillip, a CNN political correspondent who co-anchored the network’s unexpectedly stretched-out election coverage with Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, and Jake Tapper. “And carrying Joe Biden to the Democratic nomination through the primary—Black women did that.”

Phillip ended the quietly impassioned monologue by noting the significance of Kamala Harris’s presence on the ticket. “And that is the sort of historical poetry that I think we will live with for a long time: In addition to the fact that Donald Trump’s political career began with the racist birther lie, it may very well end with a Black woman in the White House.”

Clips of Phillip’s one-minute talk, which came a night before her network declared Biden the victor, quickly echoed around Twitter, and the response was intense. When HuffPost senior editor Philip Lewis tweeted it out, he got almost 30,000 likes. (And, of course, there was plenty of the nasty pushback you’d expect from certain quarters.) “I mean, it was a profound moment,” says Tapper, who was next to Phillip at the time on CNN’s election set. “There was something special about the fact that there was a Black woman at the desk noting this moment. I wasn’t thinking about whether it was going to go viral. I was just thinking, ‘Wow, what a brilliant observation, and what a special moment to experience.’ ”

https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/02/08/where-does-abby-phillip-go-from-here/