If Tuesday night’s presidential debate proved nothing else, it
demonstrated one thing: CNN’s Candy Crowley is definitely not an
“uncommitted voter.” The moderator’s handling of the town-hall
debate at Hofstra University was heavy-handed and one-sided
throughout, not merely giving more time to President Obama, but
repeatedly cutting off Mitt Romney when the Republican attempted to
counter accusations from the president.
At one point, after Obama had repeated his campaign accusation
that Romney “said we should let Detroit go bankrupt,” Romney
devoted part of his next reponse to rebutting the
mischaracterization: “My plan was to have [auto companies] go
through bankruptcy like 7-Eleven did and Macy’s and Continental
Airlines and come out stronger. And I know he keeps saying, you
want to take Detroit bankrupt. Well, the president took Detroit
bankrupt. You took General Motors bankrupt. You took Chrysler
bankrupt. So when you say that I wanted to take the auto industry
bankrupt, you actually did.” The process of bankruptcy was
necessary, Romney said, “to get those companies back on their feet,
so they could start hiring more people. That was precisely what I
recommended and ultimately what happened.”
Then Crowley said, “Let me give the president a chance,”
providing Obama an opportunity to reiterate and expand his attacks
on Romney. “Candy, what Governor Romney said just isn’t true,” the
president began, claiming that if Romney’s advice had been followed
“we would have lost a million jobs,” and ridiculing the
Republican’s economic proposals: “Governor Romney doesn’t have a
five-point plan. He has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make
sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s
been his philosophy in the private sector, that’s been his
philosophy as governor, that’s been his philosophy as a
presidential candidate.”
Obama had just called Romney a liar, and Romney was eager to
answer, but Crowley intervened: “Governor Romney — there’ll be
plenty of chances here to go on… you certainly will have lots of
time here coming up.” Preventing Romney from immediately replying
to Obama’s charges, Crowley then went to the next town-hall
questioner, who asked about energy policy.
This was just one of Crowley’s interventions that seemed
intended to benefit Obama, but she saved her worst for last when,
as
Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters said, Crowley “disgraced
herself … showing why many Americans were rightfully suspicious of
her ability to moderate a presidential debate fairly.” A man named
Kerry Ladka had asked a very specific question about the Sept. 11
attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya: “Who was it that
denied enhanced security and why?” Obama dodged the question, not
even pretending to try to answer Ladka. When Romney had his turn,
he criticized the president for attending a Las Vegas fundraiser
the day after the Libyan attack and questioned the administration’s
shifting explanations of what happened at Benghazi.”It was very
clear this was not a demonstration,” Romney said. “This was an
attack by terrorists.”
Obama was given a chance to reply and did so indignantly: “The
day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I
told the American people in the world that we are going to find out
exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also
said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.…
And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the Secretary
of State, our U.N. Ambassador, anybody on my team would play
politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is
offensive.” Romney immediately questioned that: “You said in the
Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror? … I
want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the
president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of
terror.”
Now Crowley intervened: “He did call it an act of terror. It did
as well take — it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole
idea there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You
are correct about that.”
Romney had actually mishandled the issue, but Crowley’s
intervention spawned a controversy of its own that is likely to
dominate news coverage of the debate for the next couple of days.
The full text of the President Obama’s Rose Garden speech shows
that he included in his remarks a statement apparently referring to
the obscure YouTube video that the administration wrongly suggested
had inspired the Libyan attack: “We reject all efforts to denigrate
the religious beliefs of others.” The president then made reference
to the 9/11 attacks of 2001 before saying, “No acts of terror will
ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character,
or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”
So, the phrase “acts of terror” did indeed occur in the
president’s speech on Sept. 12, but it wasn’t clear whether he
meant this to apply to the previous day’s Benghazi assault, which
officials in his administration were then describing as a
spontaneous demonstration against the YouTube video. And, as Romney
pointed out during the debate, Obama himself mentioned the YouTube
video six times during his
Sept. 25 speech to the United Nations, even though it was
already becoming clear by then that the attack in Libya had nothing
to do with the video.
In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday night’s debate, the
liberals on MSNBC gave enthusiastic praise to both Obama’s
performance and Crowley’s handling of the debate. Rachel Maddow
said the president had given the best debate showing of his entire
political career, Ed Schultz said Obama was “stellar” and Chris
Matthews was so ecstatic that, as I said
on Twitter, he was “wetting his pants in joy, gibbering like a
meth freak on laughing gas.” Obama’s feisty performance had
redeemed him in the eyes of Democrat partisans who had been so
profoundly discouraged by his anemic appearance in the first
debate. (See “Mitt’s
Biggest Turnaround Yet,” Oct. 4.) A
CNN poll found that viewers scored the debate a narrow win for
Obama, by a 46-39 margin, while a
CBS poll of “uncommitted voters” that found Obama also won
(37-33) in the overall debate also found that on the key issue of
the economy, Romney won by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.
Yet Crowley’s intervention on the Libya question, which seemed
an effort to help Obama, may have actually worsened the president’s
larger problem. Crowley herself admitted in a CNN post-debate interview that
Romney “was right in the main” in his criticism of Obama’s handling
of the Benghazi attack. Meanwhile, on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer
said that Crowley’s “incorrect and unfair” intervention had
“contaminated” the debate. By highlighting the Libyan issue and
adding a new element of controversy, however, Crowley inadvertently
ensured that the administration’s failure in Benghazi will be the
focus of post-debate news coverage — which is unlikely to improve
Obama’s re-election chances. The facts of the Libyan debacle simply
are not in the president’s favor, and the final debate — Monday at Lynn University in Boca
Raton, Florida — is specifically devoted to foreign policy. The
venerable Bob Schieffer of CBS News will host that debate, and is
unlikely to repeat Crowley’s mistakes, which are sure to be a
topic of intense controversy over the next several days.
