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Shameful CNN debate performance overshadows Hillary Clinton’s clear victory
http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/shameful-cnn-debate-performance-overshadows-hillary-clintons-clear-victory/24475/She didn’t have a perfect night and she missed a couple of opportunities to score easy points, but by any objective measure Hillary Clinton won the Brooklyn democratic debate handily. She was able to paint herself as vastly more knowledgeable and able to understand complex issues, while Bernie Sanders was too often playing defense to be able to articulate his own message. But if there was a clear loser in the debate, it may not have been Sanders. Instead the biggest loser was CNN itself.
CNN moderators Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash each had their ups and downs when it came to choosing the subject matter and framing the questions. Both were at times willing to hit back hard for a candidate’s failure to answer a direct question. They may have fared worse for what they didn’t ask. In an election where the republican candidates are heavily focused on curtailing women’s rights, the subject wasn’t mentioned once in the democratic debate until Clinton forced it into the discussion late in the evening. And after the supporters of both candidates spent the past two days sparring wildly on social media over a Sanders surrogate’s assertion that Clinton was a corporate whore, the moderators somehow never sought fit to so much as bring it up.
The third moderator, Errol Louis of NY1, had a somewhat rougher night. He fell into the rookie trap which swallows up so many first time presidential debate moderators, in which they start off by trying to impress the audience by hitting candidates with aggressive loaded questions. It never works out well, but he’s in good company. Anderson Cooper made the same mistake in the first CNN democratic debate, and Jorge Ramos fell into that trap during the Univision debate. But the real problem for CNN tonight was that it did nothing to control the rabid audience.
In the late stages of a primary race, the biggest supporters of each candidate are locked in and tend to treat the debates like a sporting event in which they root for their favorite team. On this night the audience spent what felt like half the debate applauding one candidate or another for such protracted stretches that it regularly interfered with the conversation. By the late stages, fans of Sanders in the audience were repeatedly cheering “Bernie! Bernie!” as if they were at a taping of the Jerry Springer show.
If there ends up being another democratic primary debate, which is not a given, some other network will likely be given the opportunity. One can only hope that the next host network takes steps to prevent the audience from being the unwanted star of the show, or better yet, asks the audience to remain silent until the end of each segment. And the moderators would do well to try asking about what the supporters of both candidates are already making clear they want answers on. But on this night there was no doubt that Hillary Clinton won, just as surely as CNN lost.
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