There are two ways to look at Wednesday night's debate on ABC. One is to say that George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson were atrocious, that they shamed themselves and their network by devoting all that time to red herrings, making McCarthy-esque insinuations about Barack Obama's friendship with former Weathermen radical Bill Ayers, and bringing up that flag pin non-issue.
On the other hand, it's possible that the ABC newsmen simply were asking some of the actual questions that Pennsylvania voters have been asking in the runup to next Tuesday's primary. A little Google, or a few minutes listening to C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" or "60 Minutes," reveals that there are, apparently, a lot of people expressing what seem to be genuine concerns about Obama and the flag pin, Obama and the Muslims, and other matters that Obama's core dismisses as nonsense (or as the New York Times inferred, veiled racism).
Is it the job of ABC to elevate the discourse or reflect the discourse? Careful how you answer; it's a slippery slope to Fox News.
I'm not sure it matters either way. In the end, ABC's line of questioning and the relentless message-hammering of the all-but-vanquished Hillary Clinton confirmed that Obama is the putative, all-but-coronated Democratic nominee. It was he, not she, who was kept on the defensive all night long, giving the debate the air of something like a cross between a police interrogation and a corporate job interview.
You can't lay responsibility for that only on the journos. The role of the press is to be adversarial, and ABC certainly was aware that this was a debate of unequals, electorally speaking. I think Gibson and Stephanopoulos decided this was as good a time as any to start treating Obama as the nominee, but since that wasn't (couldn't be) communicated overtly, it had to be inferred from their questioning. Oddly enough, they were aided in this mission by Obama, who once again pulled his punches (admittedly, I'd do the same if I were in his spot); and by Clinton, whose message discipline was less about why she should be president and more about why she is, as she put it, still in this race.
