WASHINGTON – CNN’s Candy Crowley tells WTOP she was surprised by some of the criticism she received after correcting Mitt Romney when the former Massachusetts governor disputed a claim by President Barack Obama during Tuesday’s second presidential debate.
Romney, the Republican nominee for president, disputed Obama’s statement that the president had described an attack on a U.S. Consulate in Libya as an act of terror the day after the incident.
Crowley, CNN’s chief political correspondent and the debate’s moderator, said during the exchange that Obama did call the incident an “act of terror.” She also vocally agreed with Romney’s assertion that the Obama administration indicated the attack was a spontaneous response to an anti- Muslim video.
Speaking on WTOP Friday morning, Crowley said the intent of her interjection was to “move the conversation along because we were running out of time.”
“I wanted to get … to what Romney was getting at, which was it took a long time for them to say, ‘Actually, there wasn’t a riot and this wasn’t about the tape,’ etc.,” Crowley says. “Doing it didn’t really come in at the kind of Defcon level it did to a lot of people.”
Crowley says she expected to be criticized following the debate for not interfering enough or reigning in the candidates more.
She says she also wishes she had asserted a “little better control” of the timing in the debate, and that she had been able to ask a few more questions.
Listen to Crowley’s full interview with WTOP above and to the right, and watch the debate exchange below. You can also see a transcript of the debate exchange over Libya here.
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