Election 2012: The Missing Obama Bounce 2.0

Political observers and wishful liberals have been waiting for the president to receive that surge in the polls that’s due to hit any time now.

After all, we’ve been told he won not one, but TWO debates over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

The post-debate instapolls said one thing yet the national and battleground polls are indicating something else.

Four days removed from the final presidential debate of the election cycle, an event where the president managed to work in an attack on his Republican opponent almost every time he had the microphone, Obama is still trailing in most of the benchmark national polls.

Romney leads President Obama by five points in the Gallup poll and three points in the Rasmussen poll.  The Republican candidate for president also has a one-point lead in an ABC News/Washington Post survey.

The battleground state polls don’t paint a much better picture for President Obama.  Romney leads in two Florida polls (+5 in Sunshine State News and +2 in Rasmussen) and enjoys a lead in two North Carolina surveys (+8 in Gravis Marketing and +1 in Civitas). 

Rasmussen has Romney and Obama tied in Wisconsin, a state where the Republican nominee had been trailing the president in recent polls, and a group called Purple Strategies has the race a tie in Virginia.  Polls conducted by Fox News and Rasmussen each gave Romney a two-point lead in the Old Dominion on Thursday.

The news on the poll front is not all bad for President Obama, who has leads in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio and Colorado surveys conducted by various polling entities, though the president does not exceed 50% in any of the polls.

After winning (according to the instapolls) a debate centered on what was billed at the Democratic ticket’s strength (foreign policy), why hasn’t President Obama experienced his own surge in the polls the way Romney vaulted over the incumbent after the Republican’s strong showing in the first debate?

Pitted against Monday Night Football and the seventh game in the National League Championship Series, 8 million fewer people tuned in to the third debate though the final match-up between President Obama and his GOP challenger still attracted 59.2 million viewers. 

Furthermore the president’s aggressiveness and his zingers made headlines and were recycled through the media for a few days, so the public received secondary exposure to the last debate. 

The debate did not take place in a vacuum so the lack of presidential leap isn’t attributable to an absence of audience.

That Romney has maintained most of his first debate gains might be indicative that many Americans made up there minds after the initial square off with the remaining debates being political theatre for the mostly decided. 

As I pointed out in a previously column, Richard Nixon performed strong in the second, third and fourth televised presidential debates of 1960 but John Kennedy won the debate that counted most, the first.

There are other explanations for President Obama’s relatively static poll numbers.

First, dissatisfaction with the economy cannot be mitigated with pithy one-liners.  Bad times can’t be spun.  There’s only so much damage control any politician can do in a televised debate when the economic reality of the times is there to greet people in the morning.

Secondly, the festering matter of Libya has eroded President Obama’s foreign policy credentials. 

The Obama Administration’s “Who’s On First?” routine concerning Benghazi would almost be amusing if an American ambassador and three others had not been killed. 

Though Romney punted on Libya in the debate’s opening and the media has worked to sweep it under the rug, the issue is still there as are some very important unanswered questions that the White House continues to dodge. 

Third, the president once again failed to offer a compelling defense for the high unemployment rate that has been part of his first term.  Though the final debate was supposed to be focused on foreign policy, the economy made a cameo appearance in the debate thanks to Romney’s linking it to national security.  And the president whiffed it again.

Finally, Obama’s third debate “smack talk”, while music to the ears of his hardcore supporters, came off as unpresidential.  The president may have impaled himself with his own rhetorical bayonet, appearing less worthy of the office he occupies.

Just as only one person at the table had the title, only one person exhibited presidential dignity.  And they were sitting in different chairs.

Scoring points doesn’t help your cause when you’re losing badly on style.

The post-debate polls don’t reflect two victories for President Obama, but a staggering loss in the first and two straight incompletes. 

It's Election Day(s)!

Yes, it’s still October but Louisianans can cast a ballot in the November election at early voting locations, with some parishes having multiple sites, through the 30th. 

Thirty-two states plus the District of Columbia allow early voting, which includes every state west of the Mississippi River but Missouri and Minnesota. 

Oregon and Washington State don’t even have an actual election day as all voting is conducted by mail, which saves money but provides the greatest opportunities for election fraud. 

Early voting is a bonanza for political machines, which don’t engage in convincing so much as hauling and perhaps providing under-the-table incentives along the way- food, booze, cigarettes or cash- for their electoral bounty. 

Election Day is supposed to be when the decision is made, not just revealed.  Furthermore, there have been instances where a candidate had won on Election Day but lost because his opponent ran up the score in early voting.

Early voting benefits political consultants, incumbents and well-funded candidates. 

Because of early voting campaigns have to sustain a high level of media expenditures for weeks and must invest in a protracted GOTV operation rather than focus their resources on a single day. 

Early voting in Arizona for the 2012 presidential election began on October 11^th, 26 days before Election Day.  If you had voted the morning early voting started, you would have cast a ballot prior to the vice-presidential debate (which was that evening) and two of the three presidential debates.

According to the National Association of Secretaries of State, the battleground state of Iowa along with four other states opened early voting in September, before any of the presidential debates were held.

The day before early voting began in Iowa, a Public Policy Polling survey had ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney at 44%, 7 points behind the president.  The week after the first debate between the major parties’ nominees, a Rasmussen poll had Romney down in Iowa only by 2 points.  Apparently Iowans had learned something about the candidates in that timeframe to cause a significant shift in the polls.

While there are people who knew they were going to vote for President Obama’s re-election in 2012 as early as November 5, 2008 (the day after he won) just as there were plenty of voters who were itching to vote for the fill-in-the-name Republican candidate before Obama had taken his oath of office, states should not encourage people to vote for president before they’ve at least had an opportunity to see them defend their records and articulate their agendas in a debate. 

Voting too early is like being a juror who renders a verdict in a trial after missing half the evidence and testimony. 

There should be provisions in state election laws to ensure the handicapped, servicemen and women and those who work away from home have their voices heard and their votes counted. 

Having thirty “election days” is unnecessary and opens the door for negative unintended consequences, from vote hauling by professional GOTV organizations to inviting people to make uninformed decisions before the maximum amount of information has been presented.

Ideally, the eve of Election Day should be a time of reflection and contemplation about where we are and where we need to be as a country, state and community. 

I’d wager that Americans have spent more time playing Angry Birds than thinking about candidates for the US Senate- the legislative body that confirms cabinet secretaries and federal judges and ratifies treaties. 

The arguments for early voting have merit, mainly providing for convenient civic participation by allowing people to “get it out of the way” and reducing crowds at voting locations. 

But early voting’s virtues are outweighed by its drawbacks: vote hauling, driving up the costs of campaigns and “early voter’s remorse”.

And though I am not an infrequent participant in early voting, I wouldn’t mind waiting  fifteen minutes or more in line on Election Day if it meant those waiting ahead of me were better informed about the decisions they were going to make.

Obama's Benghazi Web of Deceit

On September 12, 2012, President Barack Obama issued a statement on the assault on the diplomatic consulate in Benghazi, Libya. 

The president condemned the “outrageous attack” on the facility without making any reference to it being an act of terrorism though in the second sentence of the second paragraph, the president attributes what happened as being a reaction to an act of disrespect to Islam.

“While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants,” said President Obama.

On September 14^th, at the arrival ceremony of the remains of the Americans killed in Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.  It is hard for the American people to make sense of that because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.”

Two days later on Meet the Press, Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice denied that the attack was premeditated and that it was a spontaneous reaction to the internet video “Innocence of Muslims”.  “This is a response to a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world,” said Ambassador Rice.  Ambassador Rice’s assessment was based off of the “best information at present”.

Think for a moment about how absurd their assertion is.

Even though North Africa is a rough place, who brings a rocket propelled grenade launcher to a protest? 

They’re either the most naïve figures on the world stage, and thus have no business crafting our national security and foreign policy, or they are liars of the lowest order and lack the integrity to hold the high offices they occupy.

Right now signs point to the latter.

Recently leaked e-mails that were sent to the White House only hours after the attack cites that an Islamist militant group had claimed responsibility.  None of the communiqués reference a YouTube video.

It appears the president and his administration have engaged in the most egregious coordinated deception of the American public in decades. 

This is worse than Watergate and Iran-Contra. 

The Benghazi misinformation offensive was all about covering their posteriors for the election and the history books, since Secretary Clinton has not yet abandoned her own White House aspirations. 

Blurting out “I’m responsible” in a presidential debate doesn’t bring a convenient closure to the orchestrated cover-up and outright lies the Obama Administration peddled about what happened in Benghazi and the true culprits behind the murders. 

Having a frank discussion about what happened in Libya on September 11, 2012 or asking the president what he knew and when he knew it is not politicizing a tragedy.  On the contrary, doing so honors the sacrifice of those lost by determining the truth of why they died and why they were not given proper protection.

The Obama Administration wants people to believe that he “killed” terrorism by authorizing the Navy SEAL attack on Osama bin Laden’s secret compound in Pakistan, which squares with his re-election bid and conforms to his worldview that the war on terror is truly a very limited engagement. 

And while the deaths of four American members of our foreign service is, as the president put it on Comedy Central (!), “not optimal”, the tragedy is a reminder that al-Qaeda and militant Islamists are very much alive.

There is no Obama foreign policy achievement that could possibly balance out their indifference and/or inaction prior to the attack or their attempt to cleanse their hands of Ambassador Chris Stevens’s blood and fraudulently redistribute it to more convenient villains.

Amazingly nobody within the administration has been held accountable for this disaster, aside from Vice-President Joe Biden casual throwing our national intelligence community under the bus in a televised debate.

President Obama has been accused, rightfully so, of spiking the bin Laden football for political benefit.  You can add that he’s also trying to run out the clock on Benghazi with less than two weeks before the election. 

All we have gotten from the White House thus far is fairy tales, stonewalling, lies, and insults to our intelligence- that being America’s spies and our capacity as individuals to critically think.

Farewell to the Altruistic Warrior

Farewell to George McGovern, the Altruistic Warrior

Over the weekend an important role player in America’s political evolution passed away with the death of former South Dakota US Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern.

McGovern’s nomination signaled a transition between the once dominant ideologue-less machine wing of the Democratic Party to the “true liberals”.  McGovern was the Democrats’ Barry Goldwater. And like his senate colleague from the opposite side of the political spectrum, he was handily trounced in a national election.

 But on the way to annihilation, McGovern changed presidential politics forever as head of a Democratic commission charged with reforming the delegate selection process.  The systematic changes made to the nomination process ended unit rule voting at the conventions and limited the control state parties had on the selection of national convention delegates. 

A consequence of the changes was that states abandoned manipulated caucuses for presidential primaries as a means of allocating delegates. 

Though the rules would only affect the Democratic nomination process, the McGovern reforms ended up changing the Republicans’ delegate selection as well since many states simply fixed the GOP primaries on the same day as the Democratic contests.

To give you an idea of how things used to work, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey did not formally contest a single presidential primary, did not carry a single state and placed 7^th with 2.2% of the total ballots cast in the Democratic primaries.  Yet, Humphrey was nominated on the first ballot of the 1968 Democratic National Convention with 1,759.5 delegates (67%). 

Little wonder why so many activists rioted in Chicago.

McGovern benefited from his own rules when he sought the party nomination for president in 1972.  McGovern ran a competitive second against the Democratic establishment’s favored candidate, Maine US Senator Ed Muskie, in the New Hampshire primary and emerged as the candidate to beat thereafter. 

After the collapse of the “inevitable” Muskie, McGovern benefited from George Wallace’s clipping of Humphrey, who entered the race later as an alternative to the grassroots-powered McGovern candidacy.  The split field allowed the McGovern’s niche candidacy to emerge victorious in one of the most fractured presidential nomination fights in modern times. 

But McGovern’s triumph would be fleeting.  Hard feelings by many Democratic party regulars who were humbled by McGovern’s young amateurs (which included the likes of Gary Hart and Bill Clinton) during the intraparty warfare led to a division within the party that would not be healed by November. 

Whatever hope McGovern had of winning the White House was dashed in his bumbling handling of the revelation that his running mate, Missouri US Senator Tom Eagleton, had received electroshock treatment for depression.

The principled McGovern infamously stated that he stood by Eagleton “1000%” before forcing him off the ticket. 

Though the move might have made McGovern look shallow, it cannot be said Eagleton’s jettisoning was undeserved.  It would be later revealed that Eagleton had been Robert Novak’s undisclosed Democratic source behind the “amnesty, abortion, acid” framing of McGovern’s candidacy.

Anyone who honestly thinks that CREEP or G. Gordon Liddy was responsible for McGovern’s political self-immolation and landslide defeat should consider receiving the aforementioned treatment.

“Too bad McGovern didn’t win in 1972,” are words no sane person said even after the tumult of Watergate and the resignation of the 37^th president.

The exposure of the dirty tricks squad, the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the presidential complicit cover-up may have confirmed all of the negative things McGovern said about the character of the president and his men, but those revelations in no way made the Democratic Party’s leading peacenik look any more palatable as a president.

McGovern would be the first Democrat to not carry a single southern state in the history of the once-Dixie-centric party.

McGovern’s soft socialism, appeasement posturing and Jane Fonda-esque chumming with the likes of Fidel Castro made him political disagreeable to mainstream America.

McGovern at his best was the epitome of Christian compassion though at worst a naïve unwitting tool of America’s enemies, though his virtues outweighing his sins due to purity of his intent.

McGovern’s lasting reforms to the presidential nomination process and emergence as a true conscience liberal nominee for his party gave him a relevance far beyond his 37.5% of the popular vote plus the Massachusetts and DC electoral votes in the 1972 presidential election. 

On top of his political legacy McGovern was also a decorated military hero.

I’d like to close with a brief story that best sums up McGovern. 

A few years ago I had the privilege of attending a speech he gave at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans about his service as a bomber pilot in the European theatre. 

During one mission, McGovern’s plane had dropped bombs in a rural area and as his munitions fell to the earth, he saw a farmer trying to avoid being caught in the explosion.  McGovern assumed that the unfortunate civilian had died in the bombing and the image had stuck in his mind. 

Many years later he was doing an interview on a German-language television program when he related that particular bomb run and would later learn to his great relief that the “targeted” farmer saw the program and made a point of contacting the station to pass along word that he had survived by jumping in a ditch without a moment to spare.

No matter how the political chips or live bombs fell, McGovern always remained true to his conscience. 

If you could not support McGovern’s positions, you could at least respect his altruism.

Election 2012: And Round Three Goes to....

Last week I thought President Barack Obama won the town hall debate over his Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

The president was energetic and aggressive, he engaged the participants thus allowing him the opportunity to employ his trademark soaring rhetoric and smoothly got out his talking points.  The downside on Obama’s end was that he came off as snide in tone and rude with his constant interruptions.

In contrast, the ex-Massachusetts governor was overly deferential to President Obama and unwisely chose to engage the president rather than the audience (and by extension millions of television viewers), inviting Obama to bogart his speaking time. 

The upshot for Romney in the town hall debate was that he masterfully took apart the president’s record on domestic affairs, particularly concerning unemployment and the declining quality of life many Americans have endured over the past four years.

What happened on Monday night looked like a reenactment of last Tuesday’s debate, just with an emphasis on foreign policy issues and with a better debate moderator. 

Credit CBS’ Bob Schieffer for “letting the boys play”, being even-handed and avoided drawing attention to himself. 

The president was once again the aggressor swinging away at Romney, who for the most part played rope-a-dope though the ex-governor managed to connect with a few uppercuts.

And once again the CNN insta-poll gave Obama the win on points by eight points, only one more than the president’s insta-poll win in the townhall debate. 

Liberals, who mocked Republican complaints about oversampling Democrats in battleground and national polls, have vociferously derided the GOP-heavy CNN insta-poll, though the network maintains that ithe poll is constructed to measure actual viewers and not necessarily the nation or likely electorate. 

But the polls that matter going into November 6^th are those taken in the swing states and though I sincerely felt Obama triumphed over Romney last week, the surveys taken in the days after the town hall debate reflected a growing Romney lead where he was in a deadlock and contracting poll deficits where the Republican trailed the president badly.

Which begs a few questions about presidential debates two and three. 

Is it a case where Americans only cared about the first one, which would mirror what happened in 1960 when Richard Nixon failed to overcome bombing the first debate against John F. Kennedy with strong performances in the remaining debates?

Are the debates being drowned out by paid media and the polls reflecting the impact of increased spending and better advertising by the Romney camp?

Or as I speculated previously when trying to figure out why the president didn’t receive a bounce in the polls after his round two debate victory, that his win in the war of words was negated by his decidedly unpresidential mannerisms?

If the latter then President Obama did not help his re-election cause on Monday evening, where he came off as petulant.  And while his “bayonets” line might have led to hearty cheers at debate watching parties in union halls in deep blue states, his demeaning tone and obvious flub about these war instruments being anachronistic (they’re not) will follow him, particularly in the snarky savage world of social media. 

Expect to see a lot of marines to have some fun at their commander-in-chief’s expense with tweeted bayonet pics. 

As for Romney, in my opinion, he left too much in the playbook and not enough on the field. 

Perhaps in a bit of good humor hangover from the Al Smith dinner, Romney was ridiculously deferential to the president decided not to pursue the Benghazi matter, which is this White House’s greatest foreign policy failure and a visible symptom of the systematic problems of the administration’s global outlook. 

Romney did manage to call the president out on the “apology tour” and he delivered the strongest line of the night where he eloquently stated that the United States does not dictate to the world but has “freed other nations from dictators”.  Romney was also solid on Israel, challenging President Obama with being less supportive of the Jewish State than candidate Obama was in 2008.

Romney shrewdly managed to steer the debate back to the economy and amazingly President Obama testily jumped right down that rabbit hole after him, allowing the Republican to fight on more familiar turf and less advantageous ground for the president.

The Republican presidential nominee’s courtesies to the president concerning the killing of Osama bin Laden drove Donald Trump to furiously tweet his displeasure.  Trump opined that his candidate should “stop congratulating Obama for killing Bin Laden.  The Navy Seals (sic) killed Bin Laden.” 

Trump was right and Romney passed on a golden opportunity to correct the president for stealing thunder that he authorized but did not make. 

Which leaves me to wonder whether Romney intentionally assumed a passive posture in the debate so as not to commit any errors in order to protect a lead.  Politicians that adopt a zone defense strategy tend to be ahead. 

  

Whether the final president debate moved votes in any direction will not be known until Thursday.  My guess is that the third debate itself won’t matter much with the last two confirming what people saw in the first (Nixon-Kennedy '60).

Romney came off as competent, knowledgeable and presidential in all three debates while the president looked like a desperate politician unable to defend his record yet not unwilling to get personal. 

After six years of soaring rhetoric, controlled speaking environments, screened audiences, a fourth estate that has acted as his political secret service and a podium flanked by teleprompters, the debates have allowed Americans to peer behind the purple curtain to see that they’ve had a state senator for a president all along. 

With the debates concluded and two weeks to go before election day, all that’s left are more advertising, candidate scrambles to purple states, get out the vote operations and the late October/early November surprise the most cynical amongst us assume the White House is cooking up and ready to serve at a politically optimal time.  

Election 2012: Le Monde du Obama and the Third Debate

Back in August, former US Senator Gary Hart penned a piece for the Huffington Post where he argued that that President Barack Obama would win re-election by a landslide due to the Democratic ticket’s depth of foreign policy experience.

The article perplexed me, since foreign policy has rarely made a difference in the outcome of presidential elections in the past few decades, largely due to the end of the draft and the shift to an all-volunteer army. 

The other reason why I was a bit surprised by the former Democratic presidential candidate’s assertion was that I never thought the Obama Administration’s foreign endeavors were anything to brag about.

In fact, it might be said with a straight face that Joe Biden is a better running mate than Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Joe’s worst transgressions are mostly rhetorical; the “gaffes” committed by the Clinton State Department and by extension the Obama White House have come with more serious consequences sans laugh track.

The Obama/Clinton foreign policy has been a bumbling series of failures with one shining moment that the president hopes will blind the public from the totality of their failed international initiatives.

Here’s a quick rundown on their record-

The current state of relations with Russia is terrible.  Secretary Clinton’s Carrot Top-esque “Reset button” gimmick was an embarrassment and made us look foolish when it turned out the wrong word had been printed in Cyrillic on the prop.  Instead of sending a signal that the US desired improved relations with Russia, we looked like rubes, which is dangerous when dealing with the Kremlin.

President Obama’s unintended live-mic mention of post-election“flexibility” to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev concerning America’s missile defense was extremely disconcerting and the Obama Administration’s cancellation of planned missile defense sites in the Czech Republic and Poland was a sign that the US cannot be trusted to fulfill our commitments to even our most loyal allies. 

In a pathetic gesture to make us “popular”, President Obama conducted an apology tour to corners of the world that resent us.  The supplications did not pay any diplomatic dividends, but instead broadcast our naiveté that the “grievances” of the world against America are legitimate while the sins of rogue regimes are best left ignored. 

The murderous regime in Damascus apparently has received an immunity stick from the Obama Administration as it continues to kill with impunity protestors demanding democracy in Syria. 

In another example of an ally being thrown under a bus, Israeli security interests have been recklessly dismissed by the Obama Administration yet they naively extend hope for a breakthrough regarding the pursuit of a nuclear weapon by an Iranian government that is only marginally improved from the beards behind the seizure of our embassy staff in 1979.

But the biggest foreign policy albatross hanging around the neck of the Obama Administration is the murder (and possible torture) of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya. 

The State Department’s refusal to provide adequate protection and their coordinated deceit to the American public about what happened represents one of the most serious transgressions ever committed by an administration. 

It is the hope of President Obama that another body will outweigh that of Stevens’s.

President Obama’s greatest achievement in the international realm was the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. 

The president should be recognized for his bold and proper decision concerning the elimination of bin Laden in an operation that took place not only outside the military operation area but only 31 miles away from the capital of Pakistan. 

There were plenty of risks involved sending a covert military force relatively deep into another country.  It could have very well ended up like Operation Eagle Claw, the disastrous Delta Force mission authorized by then-President Jimmy Carter to free US embassy personnel being held hostage in Tehran. 

President Obama has made great political hay of his authorization of the successful mission and I assume television viewers will be reminded as much in the Monday evening debate.

While I believe Governor Romney should recognize the president’s decision as admirable, he should point out that any other occupant of the Oval Office would have given the same order to bring bin Laden to justice. 

Furthermore, Romney should call out the president’s brazen attempt to seize more credit than he deserves.  The mission was carried out by the Navy SEAL team and President Obama’s ad nauseam boasting is an affront to those who risked their lives to do the job.

Or to put it another way, he didn’t kill that.  Someone else did.  That someone being SEAL Team 6.

President Obama will also lay claim for the winding down of the American involvement in Afghanistan though the wisdom of announcing a withdrawal date is questionable.  However the Obama Administration’s position is popular with an American public that wants our countrymen to be removed from the graveyard of empires regardless of the consequences that could follow.

President Obama will also try to do the same concerning the War in Iraq, which ended under his watch though the withdrawal was established under the Bush Administration and the war was effectively won by the troop surge that broke the back of the al-Qaeda network there.  Then-senator Obama opposed the surge.

While President Obama intends to turn the final presidential debate into a “bin Laden’s dead gloat fest”, he will have a lot of explaining to do concerning the a host of other breakdowns and poor decisions that collectively represent the most disastrous foreign policy record in decades.

Former senator Hart’s rosy view of le monde du Obama notwithstanding, the president should have as much difficulty defending his foreign policy on Monday evening as he had defending his economic record in the other two debates.  

CNN Goes C.Y.A.

In the unlikely event that there are folks in the journalism trade who agonize over the suspicion conservatives hold towards the Fourth Estate, CNN’s Candy Crowley did them no favors on Tuesday night.

TMZ, better known as the corner of the internet that acts as the archive of record for Kardashian bikini pics, managed to get their mitts on an internal CNN communiqué from network executive vice-president Mark Whitaker that reads like George W. Bush’s “Brownie, you’ve done a heck of a job” praise for the infamous ex-FEMA head after Katrina.

Whitaker opens up by asking fellow CNN employees to applaud Crowley for doing “a superb job under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.” 

Really?

I thought the feminist wing of professional scribes had called assigning a female reporter to moderate the town hall debate demeaning?

ABC’s Carole Simpson, who moderated the first town hall-style presidential debate twenty years ago, said that having female reporters relegated to covering the town hall and vice-presidential debates, was “sexist” (her actual word for it) in advance of Crowley’s moderating her first presidential debate.

It’s ironic that Simpson would degrade her assignment from 1992, which featured three presidential candidates and proved to be a consequential debate when President George H.W. Bush infamously looked at his watch and added to his image of being disinterested with the hoi polloi.

So prior to the debate, Simpson more or less compared running a town hall debate to taking out the trash yet Crowley’s boss at CNN made it out as if she had climbed Mount Everest.

Whitaker continues: “She and her team had to select and sequence questions in a matter of hours, and then she had to deal with the tricky format, the nervous questioners, the aggressive debaters, all while shutting out the pre-debate attempts to spin and intimidate her.”

So with a debate that was to last 90 minutes divided by two candidates plus adjusting for different questioners, the veteran journalist not only had the burden of selecting just over a dozen questions but putting them in order with help from a staff assisting her with this Herculean task.

Oh the humanity.

Whitaker: “She pulled it off masterfully.”

Well Crowley pulled something off masterfully, but not being a good moderator.

The CNN reporter interrupted the Republican nominee for president twenty-eight times; the president only nine. 

What was that compliment Whitaker paid Crowley again?  “shutting out the pre-debate attempts to spin and intimidate her.”

So much for being the Atlantic Wall of debate moderators.  Crowley not only lied down during Barack Obama’s constant interruptions of Mitt Romney, but she also “corrected” Romney while he was arguing with the president.

Crowley was either biased for or star-struck by the president.  Perhaps she was too caught up with the thought of having the first dance at the annual “Nerd Prom”, formally known as the White House Correspondents Dinner.

At one point, Crowley started to sound like Dean Vernon Wormer from Animal House all but barking out “you’ll get your chance smart guy” when Romney insisted on having an opportunity to refute an Obama attack on his comments about the auto industry bailout.

Like the folks at the Delta Tau Chi house, Romney never did get his chance.

Whitaker continues: “The reviews on Candy’s performance have been overwhelmingly positive but Romney supporters are going after her on two points, no doubt because their man did not have as good a night as he had in Denver.”

OK- first, the talking heads at MSNBC don’t count as credible sources of praise and secondly, this “atta girl e-mail” is starting to sound like a Bill O’Reilly “Talking Points Memo”.  With good reason.

Whitaker: “On legitimacy of Candy fact-checking Romney on Obama’s Rose Garden statement, it should be stressed that she was just stating a point of fact: Obama did talk about an act (or acts) of terror; no matter what you think he meant by that that at the time.”

This is revealing.  First, as debate moderator, it’s not her job to “fact check”.  She’s not there to correct the candidates; she’s there to ensure that they follow the established procedures/agreed upon rules of engagement.  Apparently the news executive is as confused as the news reporter on the actual role of a debate moderator.

Crowley was not participating in a Sunday morning news show as a panelist but refereeing.  And she did about as well with her first attempt at this as the NFL’s scab refs.

Secondly, Whitaker is basically admitting that Obama’s claim of calling the Benghazi attack an act of terrorism is bogus and that it’s necessary for one to stretch the imagination to accept the president’s blatant stretching of the truth.

Whitaker then shifts to another grievance: that President Obama got more talking time than Romney.

“On why Obama got more time to speak, it should be noted that Candy and her commission producers tried to keep it even but that Obama went on longer largely because he speaks more slowly.”

Conservatives have hurled many insults towards President Obama but “Droopy Dog” has not been one of them. 

In an attempt to make the case for impartiality on this point, the CNN vice-president proposes a solution: “We’re going to do a word count to see whether, as in Denver, Romney actually got more words in even if he talked for a shorter period of time.”

When I read that gem, I had to Google the story to make sure this leaked memo wasn’t another “Talk Like a Pirate Day” prank. 

When you’re counting the candidates’ words, then you’re engaging in some double-plus “Cover Your Ass” scrambling and searching for any talking point to distract from the totality Crowley’s mishandling of what a feminist reporter called a format so simple to manage that it was demeaning to assign to a woman.

All Crowley needed to do is keep the candidates confined to their talking times and take questions in the prioritized order she and her staff selected.  That’s all…but perhaps not enough for a journalistic “star”. 

Obviously Crowley wanted to make her special night to be her night. 

Less yokels, more Candy. 

Crowley wanted to be more of a part of the debate than her role allowed.

Like Kanye West at the MTV video awards or those two screwballs who crashed Hank Aaron’s trot around the bases after becoming the home run king, Crowley crossed a line of appropriateness and “gonzo’d” the debate by becoming too much of a part of the story.

What Crowley did brought embarrassment to her profession and apparently her employers, who exacerbated matters through an absurd talking points memo intended to reassure the rest of the staff that their colleague “really did great” and to spin it as such.

Presidential Debate II was good for President Obama, OK for Mitt Romney but terrible for Crowley, CNN and journalism in general.