Jim Geraghty:
Man, Hillary’s biggest fans in the media are just blisteringly furious with Matt Lauer.
Journalists and longtime political observers pounced. “How in the hell does Lauer not factcheck Trump lying about Iraq? This is embarrassingly bad,” wrote Tommy Vietor, a former aide to President Obama. Glenn Kessler, the chief fact checker at The Washington Post, posted a link to NBC’s check of Mr. Trump’s claim and wrote:“@MLauer should have been prepared to do this.”
“Lauer interrupted Clinton’s answers repeatedly to move on. Not once for Trump,” Norman Ornstein, the political commentator, wrote in a Twitter message, adding: “Tough to be a woman running for president.”
On social media, surrogates for Mrs. Clinton began mounting a sustained attack on the anchor. “Imagine if @NBCNews had done its job,” wrote Nick Merrill, her press secretary, on Twitter. Neera Tanden, a close Clinton ally, was even harsher: “I guess the good news is that Matt Lauer isn’t moderating an actual debate,” she wrote.
Adam Green, co-founder, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, concluded, “This forum was an absolute disgrace. Matt Lauer treated this forum less as a chance to educate voters about the real differences in temperament and policy between the candidates and more as a chance to do clickbait trolling.”
Some of Lauer’s critics were pretty explicit about their intent to put pressure on the moderator of the first debate. Morris Pearl, the chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy progressives fighting for tax increases, put Lester Holt on notice:
I am deeply disappointed in Matt Lauer’s performance last night. At a moment when Americans are desperately looking for the right answers, Mr. Lauer failed to even ask the right questions. We hope that NBC will redeem itself at the first national presidential debate to be held on September 26th by both asking the right questions, and demanding the candidates actually answer them. In particular, we hope that Lester Holt will ask the candidates about their plans to repair our American democracy, which is currently under egregious attacks by monied interests and unscrupulous politicians who use disenfranchisement as a political strategy.
Let’s face it, the real damage to Hillary Clinton didn’t come from anything Lauer said. It came from one particular question in the audience, one that spotlighted the insanely lenient standard applied to the Democratic nominee:
Tough to be a person who filibusters running for president.
Trump was asked almost twice the number of questions than Hillary.
They had the same amount of time.
The difference?
Hillary spent so long trying to spin answers for her few questions.
Trump, while he pushed on answering a few times over Matt’s objection, answered more succinctly.
There were no questions about mishandling classified information or national security to ask Trump. Trump hasn’t lied to Congress or the FBI to be grilled about. Only Hillary.
Obviously, Matt was supposed to lob some softballs at Hillary… maybe talk about golf and grandchildren, like Bill and Loretta did. He was supposed to ask Trump some stupid trip-up question like what his favorite magazine is. Matt was naughty… Matt treated both candidates that same. No one expected that. Obviously, some were terribly disappointed.