Is There a Fix in for the Vice Presidential Debate?

The Daily Caller has a disturbing story up today. The outline goes like this: The moderator of Thursday’s vice presidential debate is Martha Raddatz of ABC News. She is the network’s senior foreign correspondent, and she is the sole moderator of the veep debate, which will center on foreign policy.

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Raddatz has a connection with Barack Obama going all the way back to their days at Harvard. They worked on the Harvard Law Review together, and Obama attended her 1991 wedding. Fast forward to the present, and President Obama has appointed Raddatz’s husband, Julius Genachowski, to the Federal Communications Commission. Genachowski is also an Obama campaign bundler, meaning that he is a major fundraiser for the president’s re-election effort. That storyline alone raises questions of corruption and rewarding political supporters with powerful federal posts. Yet ABC insists that Raddatz has no conflict of interest in moderating the debate.

As if that all wasn’t bad enough, the Caller raised all of this with ABC on Monday but the network stonewalled. It finally admitted Raddatz’s connections to Obama, but only after ABC went to Politico, the Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post to get some damage control printed on those liberal sites first.

Is this how an allegedly neutral news network should behave?

This is the kind of story a Jake Tapper would ordinarily raise in a White House press briefing, but whoops! Tapper works for ABC. And whoops! the Obama White House quietly scuttled press briefings a couple of weeks ago. The White House press corps didn’t even raise a fuss about that.

Thursday’s debate, as I mentioned earlier, is supposed to center on foreign policy. Right now the Obama administration is embroiled in what looks very much like a cover-up regarding the sacking in Benghazi. But Vice President Biden has, so far, managed to escape any scrutiny or questions about what happened in Benghazi and who knew what and when. Will moderator Martha Raddatz grill Biden about this very serious foreign policy question, or will she let him off the hook?

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In the wake of last week’s presidential debate, many on the left assailed debate moderator Jim Lehrer for his performance as a way of distracting from President Obama’s weak showing. Raddatz surely knows this. Her husband’s status with the Obama campaign plus her own longstanding connection to the president himself suggests where her political sympathies lie. She has to know that if she aggressively questions Biden, she stands a strong chance of being ripped by the left as Lehrer was.

Her and her husband’s connections to Obama plus ABC’s behavior suggest that there is a fix in for Thursday’s vice presidential debate. If Raddatz does not press Biden hard about Libya, America will know that that debate was rigged to favor the Obama administration.

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