Long story short, Candy Crowley will be the debate moderator in tomorrow's presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama and both campaigns have signed agreements with the debate commission on the rules of the debate.
It appears that the debate moderator, Candy Crowley, believes herself above the rules and not subject to them.
Both the Romney and Obama campaigns are objecting to her publicly stated, self determined role.
Via TIME's The Page:
In a rare example of political unity, both the Romney and Obama campaigns have expressed concern to the Commission on Presidential Debates about how the moderator of this Tuesday’s town hall has publicly described her role, TIME has learned.The commission told the Romney and Obama campaigns that it would discuss the matter with Crowley and reconfirm her function.
While an early-October memorandum of understanding between the Obama and Romney campaigns suggests that CNN’s Candy Crowley would play a limited role in the Tuesday-night session, Crowley, who is not a party to that agreement, has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested that she will assume a broader set of responsibilities. As Crowley put it last week, “Once the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?’”
In the view of the two campaigns and the commission, those and other recent comments by Crowley conflict with the language the campaigns agreed to, which delineates a more limited role for the debate moderator. The questioning of the two candidates is supposed to be driven by the audience members — likely voters selected by the Gallup Organization. Crowley’s assignment differs from those of the three other debate moderators, who in the more standard format are supposed to lead the questioning and follow up when appropriate. The town-hall debate is planned for Oct. 16 at 9 p.m. E.T. at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.
According to the debate-format language in the agreement, after each audience question and two-minute responses from the candidates, Obama and Romney are expected to have an additional discussion facilitated by Crowley. Yet her participation is meant to be limited. As stated in the document, “In managing the two-minute comment periods, the moderator will not rephrase the question or open a new topic … The moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates during the debate or otherwise intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period.” The memo, which has been obtained by TIME, was signed by lawyers for the two campaigns on Oct. 3, the day of the first presidential debate in Denver.
It is definitely a historical moment when Obama and Romney team up on anything.
Via Gateway Pundit, we see that Crowley has already shown her bias, publicly saying the addition of Ryan to Romney's ticket was "some sort of ticket death wish."
See video at Gateway Pundit.
Second presidential debate (October 16, 2012, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
