In last night’s slugfest between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, give Obama the win in a split decision. Not so much because he beat Romney, but because he was so much better than he was in the first debate when he stunk up the joint.
In the first debate, Romney stopped Obama’s momentum. In this debate, Obama maybe stopped Obama’s skid. Maybe not.
The biggest losers were sentient voters subjected to both a stupid debate format and a moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley, who insisted on proving she wasn’t Jim Lehrer by repeatedly stopping the candidates from, you know, debating each other and, at one point, injecting herself as judge, jury and executioner.
Did the president call the attack on our Libyan embassy an act of terrorism in the Rose Garden the day after the attack? Read the transcript and watch the video. It’s, at the very least, arguable. He did use the words “no acts of terror,” but it seems this was more of a general statement relating to the 9-11 anniversary than to the Benghazi attack specifically.
But that didn’t stop Crowley from declaring that Obama was right and Romney was wrong. No, Crowley was wrong. She should have kept her mouth shut and let the candidates, the campaigns and the media determine who was correct and who wasn’t.
Back to the debate format: a “town hall.” This format champions people so ignorant of the issues and the two candidates – who are as different as night and day (didn’t want to say black and white, lest Steven Horsford accuse me of race-baiting!) – that they are purportedly “undecided.”
As such, the questions they supposedly wrote themselves were both general and generally stupid. The questions also generally came out of left field; as in Liberaland.
The whole exercise was embarrassing. With three weeks to go before Election Day, the two men who could end up being the leader of the free world for the next four years had to subject themselves to this?
Bring back Jim Lehrer!
