It’s that spooky time of year when weird stuff happens. No, I’m not talking about Halloween; I’m talking about the final days before an election when you can almost guarantee crazy events will pop up. My advice between now and Tuesday: Don’t believe anything.
The latest addition to this rule comes to us from New Hampshire, where a debate panelist inserted himself into the final days of the U.S. Senate campaign, perhaps tipping the scales against Republican Scott Brown.
In case you missed it, during last night’s debate, WMUR analyst James Pindell engaged in a dispute with Brown over New Hampshire geography. It turns out that Brown was correct, but that might not matter. The dispute struck to the heart of Brown’s greatest vulnerability — the narrative that Brown is a “carpetbagger.”
Pindell later apologized, but it might not matter. Too often, the original narrative is what people remember. This lie, as they say, was halfway around the world before the truth got its pants on. And that might be what happens here. As Noah Rothman notes: “A fraction of the debate viewers who witnessed this brutal exchange will have seen Pindell’s subsequent apology, and Shaheen’s operatives are quietly contemplating the ethics of running with the clip if only to accentuate the theme that Brown is, at heart, a Massachusetts man.”
On Morning Joe today, Cokie Roberts noted that this gotcha question was meant to be an indictment on Brown, but it turned out to be an indictment on journalism. I don’t know about journalism, but how about debate moderators? In sports, referees are said to be doing their job if nobody notices them. Debate hosts and panelists might want to follow that template, but instead seem to be drawn toward injecting themselves into the campaign — often with terrible results.
Imagine a very close game being decided by a mistake made by a referee or umpire, and you get a sense of how potentially damaging this was to an incredibly tight race which could potentially determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
And sadly, this is something of a trend. Remember when Candy Crowley broke the agreed upon debate rules, and injected herself into the Benghazi discussion, siding with President Obama, only to later admit that Mitt Romney was “right in the main“? Her retroactive concession hardly mattered. The moment was stolen. The public grants “expert” status to the one asking the questions. And so, in the public’s mind, Romney had been proven wrong.
The stakes are too high for this to keep happening.