The Loser in Last Night’s Debate Was ABC News

The post-debate commentary today was voluminous — and most of it was about the appallingly bad job George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson did as moderators.

Here is the transcript.

Greg Mitchell commented at The Huffington Post, link above, and at Editor and Publisher:

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the overall state of the economy and dozens of other pressing issues had to wait for their few moments in the sun as Obama was pressed to explain his recent “bitter” gaffe and relationship with Rev. Wright (seemingly a dead issue) and not wearing a flag pin while Clinton had to answer again for her Bosnia trip exaggerations.

Then it was back to Obama to defend his slim association with a former ’60s radical — a question that came out of rightwing talk radio and Sean Hannity on TV, but delivered by former Bill Clinton aide Stephanopolous. This approach led to a claim that Clinton’s husband pardoned two other ’60s radicals. And so on.

At the end, Gibson announced a final commercial break — even though the debate was over — and was loudly booed. Gibson reacted by laughing dismissively, raised his hands as if in self-defense, and said, “Oooh, the crowd is turning on me.”

Viewers blasted Gibson and Stephanopoulos in the comments section at ABC News’ website. Huffington Post has a sampling.

Will Bunch published an “open letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos” at Philly.com that for reasons unknown was removed from the site. Here is what you see when you click on the link at Memeorandum.

Philly.com does have another good column about the debate, though. Larry Eichel points out that Gibson needs a refresher course in the U.S. Constitution:

In the first question of the night, Gibson asked Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton whether they’d agree to former New York Gov.Mario Cuomo’s suggestion that the winner of the delegate fight should be the presidential nominee and the loser should be the running mate. Neither went along with that.

So Gibson pressed: Just to quote from the Constitution again, “In every case” — Article II, Section 1 —
“after the choice of the president, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the vice president.”

Alas, that part of the Constitution no longer applies. And it hasn’t for more than 200 years. If it did, John Kerry would be vice president today.

It was superseded by the Twelfth Amendment, which was passed in 1804. The amendment says there will be separate elections for president and vice president. It was adopted after the mess the country went through as the result of the election of 1800, the first time we actually had two parties vying for the presidency.

Stephanopoulos told Michael Calderone of The Politico that the questions he and Gibson asked were “tough but appropriate.”

When I asked whether questions about flag pins or Bosnia are actually relevant to voters, he replied: “Absolutely.”

“The vote for the president,” Stephanopoulos said, “is one of the most personal” decisions that someone makes.

“When people make that choice, they take into account how candidates stand on the issues,” he said, but also are concerned with “experience, character [and] credibility.”

“You can’t find a presidential election where those issues didn’t come into play,” he said.

Stephanopoulos explained that since the candidates are not far apart policy-wise, the “core of the nomination fight” has been about these issues.

“They’ve been fighting it out on this turf,” he said, adding that these are things that “came up between this debate and the last one.”

These are things that “came up”? Like, by magic? Who brought them up? Who asked Obama why he wasn’t wearing a flag pin in the first place, back in the fall of last year? Oh, WOW! Lookee here! It was an ABC News reporter! Who played endless tape loops of one out-of-context segment from a sermon given by Obama’s former pastor?

Also, if Stephanopoulos thinks that voters consider flag pins relevant to their voting decisions, he needs to read the comments right below Calderone’s piece.

I’m going to end this post with Obama’s response to Stephanopoulos’s request that Obama “explain that relationship [with William Ayers] for the voters and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem,” because I think it shows how calm and rational Obama is even under this kind of pressure:

Obama, who a moment before had complained about “manufactured” issues, responded: “George … this is an example of what I’ve been talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.

“And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense, George.”

Obama then broadened the point by bringing up his friendship with Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma,

… who he termed “one of the most conservative Republicans” in the Senate and a politician who “once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions.”

Continued Obama: “Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements? Because I certainly don’t agree with those, either.

“So this kind of game in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, that somehow their ideas could be attributed to me, I think the American people are smarter than that. They’re not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn’t.”

Obviously, last night’s debate was run by two journalistic incompetents; the subjects raised were outrageously irrelevant to who would make a better president for the issues that actually matter. But maybe this will work to Obama’s advantage. Only the most mean-spirited voters (who probably disliked Obama long before this) could fault him overmuch for how he handled himself given the utter stupidity of the questions he was asked. I tend to think, from the reaction I’ve seen, that the blowback from Americans furious at how ABC News wasted their time and insulted their intelligence will cancel out any negative fallout coming from Obama’s difficulty answering any of the questions.

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