As debate moderator, Ifill was awful

By Barry Garron

The buzz before Thursday night's vice presidential debate, at least in the conservative blogosphere, was that Gwen Ifill of PBS was a bad choice for moderator. Turns out they were right, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Supporters of McCain/Palin had all the normal trepidations about anyone connected with PBS, that liberal-infiltrated bastion of do-gooders. But there was a special concern about Ifill, who moderates "Washington Week."

She has been working on a book called "Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama." The McCain camp knew about the book when they approved Ifill and, according to her, she has yet to write the chapter on Obama. Still, just the title might suggest she had a vested interest in a victory by Barack Obama.

Even without the book, the odds are--according to polls that indicate overwhelming support for Obama among black voters--Ifill favors the Democrat.

As it turns out, Ifill did not betray a pro-Obama bias. She was a poor moderator for both candidates. In fact, if anyone benefitted from her style, it was Republican Sarah Palin and not Democrat Joe Biden.

Seated in front of the stage, Ifill had the temperament of a judge on a syndicated daytime court show, barely concealing contempt for both candidates. Questions were posed in a curt, almost hostile, manner. At one point, after both candidates gave their stances on same-sex civil unions, Ifill abruptly summarized their positions as the same and moved on, as if they had been wasting her time.

At other times, her questions were just plain dumb. Strategically, no running mate is going to take issue with his or her principal. It therefore makes no sense to waste time asking how a Palin administration would differ from McCain's or how a Biden administration would differ from Obama's.

In addition, there's no point asking for an example of how the candidate changed his or her mind on an issue. While, logically, one should change one's mind when faced with contradictory facts, doing so in politics is perceived as lack of decisiveness. No one admits, at least on a serious issue, to being a flip-flopper.

Perhaps the greatest irony, though, is that Ifill, whether because of pre-debate intimidation or just because it was her style, turned out to be a gift for Palin.

From her earliest responses, it quickly became clear that Palin had been coached to acknowledge every question and then ignore it. Instead, she moved to a list of carefully memorized talking points that, most of the time, had nothing to do with what she had been asked. On the rare occasion she was actually directed to respond to a point, she said she didn't want to argue about it. Or she just blathered that pundits would say something the next day but here's what she wanted to say.

That's politics, of course, but this is a debate, not a town hall. A good moderator politely but firmly tells the candidate he or she has failed to address the question and offers one last opportunity. By rarely doing this, Ifill allowed Palin to get away with being unresponsive to nearly every question that was posed.

Maybe it's time we stopped lowering debate expectations for the candidates and started raising them for the moderator.

Comments

[Lenni]

I also thought Ifill was just Awfill. After awhile I started getting angry that she wasn't even trying to get Palin to actually answer the question(s) as asked.

Palin drives me batty. The sound of her voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard, and her cute, folksy expressions seem canned and purely for show. I, for one, would be embarrassed to have a VP who winks at colleagues and speaks using phrases like "gee gosh" and "you betcha."

Palin sounds frighteningly like the character Edie McClurg played in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (Ed Rooney's secretary, Grace). I keep waiting for her to pull a pencil out of her topknot. "McCain...he's a righteous dude." Yikes.

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