With the news of Candy Crowley’s departure from CNN making the rounds Friday afternoon, one crowd that won’t necessarily be missing the “State of the Union” host much is Mitt Romney and his campaign team.
“Candy Crowley committed one of the most significant blunders of any moderator in the history of presidential debates,” Ryan Williams, a former Romney spokesman, told The Daily Caller.
Infamously, while moderating the second of three presidential debates in 2012, Crowley decided to correct Gov. Romney and confirm President Barack Obama’s claim that he described the Benghazi attack as an act of terror the day after the event, while that is not true, as the Washington Post’s fact checker Glenn Kessler noted at the time.
“He did, in fact, sir, call it an act of terror,” Crowley interjected, telling Romney, leading to one of the more memorable moments during the three debates.
“Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” Obama asked her, to which she obliged.
Needless to say, Team Romney has not forgotten the blunder, but Williams was willing to look past it to praise Crowley’s work besides the debate.
“That being said, Candy has had a long and distinguished career at CNN that shouldn’t be marred by a single error. I wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors,” he added.
In a January interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Romney criticized Crowley’s perceived role during the debate, telling the host he doesn’t think it’s the debate moderator’s job to “insert themselves into the debate and to declare a winner or a loser on a particular point.” (RELATED: Romney Breaks Silence On Candy Crowley’s Debate Interference)
Romney: “Well, I don’t think it’s the role of the moderator in a debate to insert themselves into the debate and to declare a winner or a loser on a particular point. And I must admit that at that stage, I was getting a little upset at Candy, because in a prior setting where I was to have had the last word, she decided that Barack Obama was to get the last word despite the rules that we had.”
“So she obviously thought it was her job to play a more active role in the debate than was agreed upon by the two candidates, and I thought her jumping into the interaction I was having with the president was also a mistake on her part, and one I would have preferred to carry out between the two of us, because I was prepared to go after him for misrepresenting to the American people that the nature of the attack.”
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