C-SPAN’s longtime host Steve Scully, scheduled to moderate next week’s presidential town-hall debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden that may or may not happen, received a robust vote of confidence Friday from Chris Wallace and a host of prominent Republicans the morning after a post from his Twitter account prompted a political media uproar. Fox News Sunday host Wallace, who moderated last week’s presidential debate, along with Fox News commentator Karl Rove and former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer were among Scully’s defenders after Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, announced that a question tweeted […]
United States presidential election debates
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When President Barack Obama bombed the first presidential debate of his 2012 re-election campaign, then-Vice President Joe Biden was tasked with triage: righting a campaign that appeared on the verge of sinking. On Wednesday night, with President Donald Trump’s illness and hospitalization with COVID-19 cementing public skepticism of his administration’s handling of the pandemic, Vice President Mike Pence faced a similar, though even more daunting challenge. But while he successfully played the same role he has filled for the past four years—that of the Trump translator, sanitizing or spinning the more unseemly things espoused by his boss—there was one thing even […]
Asked in a recent interview how things were going as Election Day draws near, a state elections director paused, searching for the right words. “I feel like I’ve got democracy in a boat,” the director told The Daily Beast, “and my staff is bailing water out while people are drilling holes in it.” That official, who spoke anonymously to discuss the situation candidly, sums up how many election officials around the country are feeling right now. In normal times, they’re a group of professionals used to getting the job done with what meager funds they typically get—proud of it, even. Few, […]
Even Steve Scully—the mild-mannered, straight-shooting face of C-SPAN who’s preparing to moderate the Oct. 15 presidential town hall debate—isn’t safe from the slings and arrows of outraged Trumpkins. On Thursday night, Scully became the Republican Party’s latest media pinata as FoxNews.com published a story headlined “Trump campaign calls out second debate moderator who interned for Biden, worked for Ted Kennedy.” Forty-two years ago, when he was an 18-year-old communication and political science major at American University in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania-native Scully obtained an unpaid, college-credit internship with the office of first-term Republican Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania. When that internship fell […]
“Get ready for democracy to crumble!!!” Stephen Colbert shouted at the top of his live post-debate monologue Tuesday night. “I come to you tonight, ladies and gentlemen, an empty vessel, a man with a mind wiped clean,” the Late Show host said. “I have stood in the swirling chaos of creation. I have seen Shiva dancing his destructions, wielding his trident, carving great gouts out of universe. The sky, once both red, blue, and black until all that remained was a starless void and the hollow husk once known as Chris Wallace. We have emerged from the mad whirlwind where we […]