Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson
The Candy Crowley Debate
What do we remember, if anything now, about the second presidential debate of 2012?
Not whether Obama or Romney won.
But only how CNN’s Candy Crowley blew up her career and embarrassed CNN—by outrageously hijacking the debate, and as a partisan, fact-checking (and erroneously so) Romney in efforts to help Obama.
So, too, we won’t remember much of these debate details, given the shameful role of the two ABC moderators.
Harris came out calm, exceeded low expectations, repeated well her memorized talking points, avoided until the last 20 minutes her trademark word-salads, and repeatedly baited and incited an increasingly angrier Trump.
Harris called for unity, while smearing him as a racist and repeating the old lies about Charlottesville, “bloodbath,” the 2025 project, and Trump’s supposed support for a federal ban on abortion.
Trump might seem to have matched or beaten Harris if one only reads a transcript of the entire debate—given she never honestly would or could reconcile her past and antithetical present positions.
Nor could Harris explain why she simply did not implement her visions either the last three years or would do so in the next five months.
An irritated Trump started well and ended well; she in-between calmly and successfully at times baited and got Trump’s goat.
But all that will neither matter nor be recalled.
The debate will instead be remembered as a three-on-one pile-on, given the unprofessional and biased team of ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. Rather than refuting pre-debate fears that their past anti-Trump biases would warp the debate, they only confirmed them.
Both disrupted the tempo to fact check (sometimes in error), and to editorialize Trump’s statements, while letting Harris’s Charlottesville, IVF, national abortion ban, “bloodbath” or 2025 lies go unchecked.
Often their disruptive fact checks of Trump were simply wrong, such as their preposterous claim that no states allow partial birth or late abortions where the viable baby is terminated—when at least six states put no limitations on any abortions.
The questions addressed to Trump on January 6 were designed to provoke. They had no counterpart addressed to Harris—as for example, would she distance herself from Biden, or how she came to win the nomination without winning any elected delegates, or her last person in the room on Afghanistan boast, or if she wished to retract any of her inflammatory past statements, such as bragging that the deadly 2020 demonstrations would not and should not stop, or her tweets to help bail out violent 2020 rioters, or her lie that the border patrol whipped immigrants in the manner reminiscent of slavery and the Klan, or her boast that she was a radical and woke.
Instead, Muir and Davis only asked Trump about supposedly controversial past statements.
Harris was never reprimanded for trying to speak over Trump. Trump was reminded to address the question asked; not so Harris who rarely did.
Watching the entire debate may have aided Harris, given her low expectations. Yet the better sound bites in the next week may help Trump. But the moderators’ shameless bias may swing empathy toward Trump.
So, the real story was how ABC’s moderators ruined the debate, their own reputations, and their network's brand.
7:24 AM · Sep 11, 2024
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