So, CNN‘s Candy Crowley, who is going to moderate tomorrow’s townhall-style presidential debate, wants to interject herself into the Q & A of the contenders by the public despite that not being what either campaign agreed to.
While an early October memorandum of understanding between the Obama and Romney campaigns suggests CNN’s Candy Crowley would play a limited role in the Tuesday-night session, Crowley, who is not a party to that agreement, has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested she will assume a broader set of responsibilities. As Crowley put it last week, “Once the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?’”
In the view of both campaigns and the commission, those and other recent comments by Crowley conflict with the language the two campaigns agreed to, which delineates a more limited role for the moderator of the town-hall debate. The questioning of the two candidates is supposed to be driven by the audience members themselves — likely voters selected by the Gallup Organization.
I guess Ms. Crowley heard all the criticism that Jim Lehrer received for being a potted plant and she doesn’t want to get the same treatment. I can’t say that I blame her. Personally, I would prefer it if she would call bullshit because otherwise that becomes the president’s job. And the president would rather answer the voters’ questions than spend all his time correcting whatever it is that Romney just said.
Newt Gingrich said (about Romney) that it is impossible to debate a liar. I don’t think it is impossible, but it is more difficult if there is no moderator willing to challenge blatant falsehoods and flip-flops. In the Saturday Night Live skit of the first debate, they had Jim Lehrer tell the president that Romney had just claimed credit for killing bin-Laden. They got that wrong. Jim Lehrer probably wouldn’t have even mentioned a lie like that. At least, that’s what his record on that night tells us. We don’t need a repeat of that.
On the other hand, Candy Crowley’s idea of the truth has never been all that firm, so maybe she should just stay out of it.
“Candy Crowley’s idea of the truth has generally been rooted firmly in right wing talking points.” There, fixed.
There, fixed. Crowley is a terrible journalist. I was horrified when I heard she had this gig.
That’s fairly sums up my opinion, too. Crowley is just too deeply embedded in The Beltway Insider Bubble. My expectations are very low that she will be anything but disastrous. She has proven time and again that her brain has long been wired for the right-wing memes.
YES!!! She is a right wing mole in the CNN stable, who might as well be on Fox and Friends for all her “objectivity”. I have watched her for several years manipulate news items through the technique of giving a seemingly objective “headline” in the first two seconds of a segment, and then going directly into an examination of the event from an obviously winger viewpoint. I would like to see more reality-based Soledad O’Brien-type digging in, but you will NEVER see that from Candy. She will push this debate from a rightwing direction the whole way, and the problem is, it will be subtle and not overt. No one who is not used to analyzing her techniques will be aware of it till the knife is in and it is too late.
Obama is STILL naive.
I remember one thing above all other about Crowley. On election night 2000 she was one of the on-the-spot reporters, I believe (but not 100% sure) in Tennessee at the Gore supporter gathering.
The one good thing about election night 2000 was that the dramatic shift in conventional wisdom from Gore-will-win to Bush-will-win allowed us to see the true allegiances of the TV people. People like Paul Begala were all smiles early in the night – in fact my first inkling that something was wrong was when they put him on and his face had suddenly gone very grim. People like Brit Hume and Pat Caddell were the exact opposite.
Crowley was one of those who, like the cast of Fox, opened the night with demeanors they were reporting on a major natural disaster that had taken the lives of their families, then switched over to demeanors that were equivalent to a home team world championship celebration.
She’s totally in the GOP camp. The fact that the Obama team let her moderate means to me that they aren’t fighting this tooth-and-nail like they should be, possibly due to their potentially fatal trust that the “other side” are playing by Queensbury rules. And if they missed this one what else are they missing – especially around vote fixing efforts?
I was reading her bio and she has the creds which include being well loved at CNN and someone who actually reads Bills and is well informed.
That confounds me because her interviews are not ones where she holds a camps’ feet to the fire. Soledad has been doing that but not Candy.
That said, Candy’s bent is not to supplement with factual corrections to back up the premise of a question but instead to sideline. That’s not just unhelpful but outright dangerous as the candidate will end up answering Candy’s point instead of the audience’s.
A successful debate for Obama will be one where he manages to add onto Joe’s laughter at the absurd and somehow gets the Town Hall to laugh with him at Romney. Now that would be a win!
A successful debate for Obama will unfortunately be whatever the pundits declare it to be based on whatever criteria they arbitrarily apply to explain their declaration.
Over the weekend Nate Silver said that you could see in the polling–initial reactions to Obama were favorable but changed as they saw the pundits talk about it. They didn’t stop talking about it and you can see it reflected in the polls.
I really believe that the media want a horse race and that the corporate owners want a Romney presidency. The only thing that we can control is our response. We have to stand up for our President post debate, donate, knock on doors, make calls, and vote.
Nate Silver encouraged pundits to give a reprieve after the debate for just 1/2 hour and play pictures of cuddly pandas or something just to give people a chance to form an opinion without being told what to think. Chris Hayes joined in that he won’t be on Twitter for the same reason.
So, once again the liberals in the media are disarming from pushing spin, giving the Republicans to have the post-debate spin to themselves. Hayes is a moron.
Well it was the “liberal” channel MSNBC that pushed the debate disaster meme more than any of the others.
The collective freakout on MSNBC gave the right wing media all the momentum that was needed to create this vision of catastrophic fail by Obama. That’s why some of the hyperbole that gets tossed out on their airwaves every night gets a bit tiresome at times.
Crowley, right-wing hack that she is, will go after Obama.
That’s my concern too. And doing so while fluffing Mitt.
While I too cannot stand Crowley for the reasons already listed in this thread, I am not going to light my hair on fire the day before the debate. Obama can handle Crowley, and he’s much better at talking to people than Romney is.
I honestly don’t think it is the moderator’s job to call out the lies. That means the moderator is making judgments as to the content — where does that stop? That is the debater’s job.
Mark Halperin claims to have a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding the candidates and agreed to.
According to Halperin, the MOU, which he said Crowley is “not party to,” calls for the moderator to play a relatively limited role in the town-hall debate:
“In managing the two-minute comment periods, the moderator will not rephrase the question or open a new topic … The moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates during the debate or otherwise intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period.”
Crowley, not being a part of the agreement has been stating her participation will be otherwise and stating so in no uncertain terms.
“After seeing some of those comments, Halperin wrote, both the Obama and Romney campaigns cried foul, complaining to the CPD. However, Crowley is not specifically ordered to follow the rules set out by the MOU. But it would appear that debate control is something both campaigns can find common ground about. It remains to be seen whether their extremely public attempt to corral Crowley will work or not.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/candy-crowley-debate-complaints-obama-romney_n_1966386.html
And so it goes, which only goes to emphasize how important this debate is to both parties. Did anyone think Ms. Crowley would not be demonized just as Mr. Lehrer, and Ms. Raddatz was? The question is who decided on the modertors. Was it the Commission on Presidential Debates? Time to get the League of Women Voters back, if they will do it.
I though I’d read that Crowley gets to chose which questions will be asked of the candidate chosen front he questions submitted by audience. that in and of itself will interject her into the debate.
I hope she at least covers a question about immigration and women’s issues. since this is domestic policy & there is a FP debat next week,lets leave FP until then and focus on the domestic issues not discussed in the debate so far.
I don’t expect her to be any less of the hack she is, but a happy medium between Lehrer & Raddertz would be good, IMHO
The Queen of “Some People Say” – ugh!
Just another obstacle in the way.