Russert uses Saturday Night Live script for Dem debate

Adam Nagourney:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the final debate before Tuesday’s critical primaries with two imperative goals: Challenge Senator Barack Obama’s qualifications to lead the country and raise doubts about his ability to defeat a Republican opponent as experienced as Senator John McCain.

For most of 90 minutes, Mrs. Clinton grabbed at every opportunity to accomplish those goals. She questioned Mr. Obama’s foreign policy credentials. She attacked campaign mailings he had sent out about her as “misleading.” She criticized him as failing to reject explicitly the endorsement of his candidacy by Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader.

Yet by the end of the night, there was little evidence that Mrs. Clinton had produced the kind of ground-moving moment she needed that might shift the course of a campaign that polls suggest has been moving inexorably in Mr. Obama’s direction for weeks.

Instead, in contrast to other debates — where she mixed a warm smile with a sharp attack — she was stern and tense through most of the evening, speaking in an almost fatigued monotone as she recounted her criticisms of Mr. Obama, some of them new but many of them familiar. She often sat staring unsmiling at Mr. Obama and at Tim Russert of NBC News, who, yet again, presented himself as a tougher challenge to Mrs. Clinton’s credentials than Mr. Obama himself.

Her most memorable moment — the one that seemed destined to be replayed in the days ahead — was not, say, a sharp rejoinder to Mr. Obama that might undermine his credentials and tilt undecided voters toward her. Rather, it was when she invoked a “Saturday Night Live” skit from last Saturday that showed television journalists fawning over Mr. Obama, another example of her campaign’s increasing frustration over what it considers unbalanced coverage of the Democratic race.

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Indeed another writer for the Times, Alessandra Stanley, thought the comparison was apt.

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And for the rest of the evening, the MSNBC debate did look a bit like the “S.N.L.” parody.

Mr. Obama twice mispronounced Massachusetts (“Massatoosetts”), the state where he went to law school. Later, Tim Russert, a moderator, challenged Mrs. Clinton to name — and pronounce — President Vladimir V. Putin’s chosen successor in Russia.

“Who will it be?” he asked. “Do you know his name?” She managed, gamely, referring to Dmitri A. Medvedev as “um, Med-medvedova, whatever.”

Mrs. Clinton was under attack, but the toughest blows came not from Mr. Obama but from Mr. Russert, who fiercely questioned her about her past positions on Nafta, Iraq and even a campaign promise from 2000, in her first Senate run. But she was combative right back, and kept arguing, with ardor and sometimes anger, at times interrupting and overriding Mr. Obama’s words and even the moderators’. (At one point, Mr. Obama flashed the NBC newsmen a conspiratorial look, and complained that he was being “filibustered.”)

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Nagourney seem to prove his own bias by suggesting that Obama was the candidate with "relatively little to prove." Little to prove? This guy is a cipher who talks in platitudes to hide his liberalism. Just because Nagourney and the Times are comfortable with that does not mean the rest of the country should be.

In the fall McCain should start every debate by asking Obama if he is comfortable, just to get that part out of the way early, then proceed to make him as uncomfortable as possible about his liberalism.