Candy Crowley is a political hack, who chases after the existing DC political wisdom the majority of the time. She has started insisting that she be given more autonomy in tonight’s debate. I think she is mainly doing this for ego reasons, because Raddatz’s performance was so much better than Lehrer’s, and because following the rules for the debate she originally agreed to will make her look like a robot and not a reporter. However there is a problem; the “followups” she plans to craft, if allowed tonight, will probably not accurately reflect at all what “real citizens” want to hear, which is the purported purpose of this format. I don’t want to see her re-interpretation of the questions (already carefully selected by the bipartisan Presidential Debate Commission to challenge neither candidate seriously) because I think they would turn into standard David Gregory-style beltway hackery. This would take the form of “citizen” questions, followed by mostly non-responsive answers from the candidates, and then Crowley would “follow up” by twisting the conversation to the right in most cases of what the original question was.
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