At least so far, it doesn’t look like the firestorm has gotten to him:
At some point amid the hailstorm of criticism that greeted ABC’s handling of yesterday’s Dem debate, moderator George Stephanopoulos received an email — one of the many, many missives about the debate he’s received — from an Obama adviser.
“Feel like a candidate today?” the adviser asked.
In an interview with me moments ago, Stephanopoulos strongly defended his handling of the debate. He dismissed criticism that it had focused too heavily on “gotcha” questions, arguing that they had gone to the heart of the “electability” that, he said, is forefront in the minds of voters evaluating the two Dems.
“Overall, the questions were tough, fair, relevant, and appropriate,” Stephanopoulos argued. And he rejected the claim by many Obama supporters that the debate had been stacked against him, saying Hillary had faced sharp questioning, too.
Today on the campaign trail Obama criticized ABC’s handling of the debate, characterizing it as “the roll out of the Republican campaign against me in November.”
Asked to respond, Stephanopoulos said that getting criticized “comes with the territory.”
“Our job is to ask the questions,” he said. “His job is to go out and win votes.”
Asked to defend the fact that policy didn’t come up for the first 40 or so minutes of the debate, Stephanopoulos said:
“We decided to focus at the top on the issues that had been at the center of the debate since the last debate. Everything we brought up in that front section had not come up since the last debate. And they all focused on the same theme — which candidate would be a stronger Democratic candidate in Novembber.”
“This is the core question for the campaigns, and a lot of Democratic voters right now. That’s why we decided to lead with it.”
Exactly.
As I said yesterday, if this had been the first debate between these two candidates, it would be one thing. But it wasn’t the first debate, it was the 21st debate. All those policy issues that people are talking about have been talked about ad nauseum for over a year now. Moreover, the truth of the matter is that, on policy grounds, there aren’t really that many substantive differences between Clinton and Obama. Given that, questions that come down to character and ability to lead are entirely appropriate.
