With help from Candy Crowley, President Obama gets lucky in debate over Libya attack

Over at The Washington Post, Chris Cillizza makes a sound argument that debate moderator Candy Crowley may have intervened forcefully on Tuesday in defending President Obama about what he had said about the Benghazi attack, but nonetheless Mitt Romney flubbed his opportunity to hammer the incumbent for the muddled way information was made public.

Frankly, the Republican nominee lost the high ground when he focused too intently on what was said by Obama immediately after the attack that killed our ambassador and three other Americans.

The testy exchange over Libya went up a few notches when Romney said the president failed for two weeks to acknowledge that the deadly incident in Libya was a terrorist attack.

“But what followed was about the best Obama could have hoped for out of the exchange,” wrote Cillizza.

Romney challenged Obama’s claim that he had called the attack an act of terror the day after it occurred. When Romney asked Obama to repeat the statement,  believing he had caught him in a lie, the incumbent followed with this odd response: “Please proceed, governor.”

That’s when CNN’s Crowley “inserted herself into the debate in a big way,” according to Cillizza, giving the Republicans a post-debate talking point (once again) about biased moderators.

Crowley interjected: “He did, in fact, sir (call it an act of terror).”

For the record -- the Obama quote in the Rose Garden the day after the Sept. 11 attack was: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”

Obama was so happy with that lifeline tossed out by Crowley that he blurted out, “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” And she did.

Cillizza believes that quick exchange between the three people on stage knocked the wind out of Romney’s argument. And the Post’s columnist/blogger adds this:

“Now, Republicans will argue …that Obama didn’t directly label the attack in Benghazi as terrorism in the Rose Garden, speaking only broadly about terror. They will also note that, for two weeks thereafter, he didn’t use the word ‘terror’ while discussing the tragedy.

“But the fact is, instead of having a policy argument about what Obama did or didn’t do for Americans in Benghazi and how he handled the situation in the days after it occurred -- a very tough issue and one that will undoubtedly be a major theme of the foreign policy debate next week --we’re going to have a process argument over whether Romney flubbed his attack on the issue and when exactly Obama called the attack ‘terrorism.’”