After a New-Look Debate, a Harsh Light Falls on the Moderator

Mr. Lehrer’s light touch was widely criticized during and after the debate on Wednesday night, particularly by Democrats who felt that President Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, effectively moderated the debate himself. Speaking to CNN after the debate, Stephanie Cutter, the president’s deputy campaign manager, said, “I sometimes wondered if we even needed a moderator because we had Mitt Romney. We should rethink that for the next debate.”

But conservatives suggested that critiques of Mr. Lehrer were just excuses for Mr. Obama’s own poor performance in the debate.

Mr. Lehrer, 78, the former anchor of the “NewsHour” on PBS, moderated 11 presidential debates between 1988 and 2008. He had decided to do no more, but the Commission on Presidential Debates persuaded him to come back this year.

He said he was persuaded by the potential of the new format: it allowed for six 15-minute conversations, each starting with a question and two-minute answers from each candidate. The format was appealing to Mr. Lehrer, who has consistently said that his job as moderator is to get out of the way and get the candidates talking.

He succeeded in getting out of the candidates’ way in Wednesday night’s debate, and when he did speak, it was often in phrases like “excuse me,” “wait” and “please.” Throughout the evening, he strained to interrupt when the candidates went over their allotted time. And at one point he faced a testy Mr. Obama, who complained that the moderator had cut him off by saying that time was up. “I had five seconds before you interrupted me,” Mr. Obama said.

At other times, both candidates seemed to completely ignore Mr. Lehrer. When Mr. Obama criticized Mr. Romney as failing to provide more specifics about his economic plans, Mr. Romney insisted on responding. “No, but,” Mr. Lehrer said as Mr. Romney kept on going. He spoke for a minute, completing his entire thought without interruption from the moderator.

Because the first five topic areas took up more than 15 minutes each, the candidates only had three minutes to talk about the sixth topic, cures for partisan gridlock in Washington.

In an e-mailed statement Thursday afternoon, Mr. Lehrer said he thought the new format accomplished its purpose, “which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance.” He continued, “Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow, and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that 90 minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention.”

The critiques came from several sides of the media spectrum.

“Boy, Jim Lehrer got rolled over,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said on “Morning Joe” on Thursday morning. “You could see an exasperated look on Jim’s face when they would just keep plowing right over him,” said Gretchen Carlson on “Fox & Friends” on Fox News. Speaking on CNBC Thursday morning, Steve Liesman offered up what he called a “private-sector solution” to the moderator dilemma: “Why can’t the two guys take care of themselves?”

The complaints about Mr. Lehrer seemed loudest from the left. Bill Press, whose liberal radio program is simulcast on Current TV, started on Thursday by saying Mr. Lehrer “lost control of the debate, and Mitt Romney ran all over him like a truck crushing a bug.” The liberal media monitoring group Media Matters said Mr. Lehrer had “lost the debate” by missing “repeated opportunities to press Mitt Romney into offering specifics on his policy proposals.” Richard Kim, a writer for The Nation, concluded that Mr. Lehrer’s version of moderation “is fundamentally unequipped to deal with the era of post-truth, asymmetric polarization politics — and it should be retired.”

The six-topic format for a debate primarily about domestic policy also drew complaints that many issues — gun control, abortion, reproductive rights, gay rights, the environment — were not addressed.

Alan Schroeder, a Northeastern University professor who has written books about debates, said that “in Jim Lehrer’s defense, this was an untested format.”

Mr. Schroeder said Wednesday’s session reminded him of televised debates he has studied in France and Spain, where “the role of the moderator is to set up the topics, then hang back and let the candidates go at it.”

The next debate between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney will be moderated by Candy Crowley of CNN, who notably did not join the chorus of complainers about Mr. Lehrer’s performance on Wednesday night. She credited Mr. Lehrer for trying throughout his moderating career to get candidates to engage with each other.

“In the end, this debate is, you know, brought to you by these candidates,” she said on CNN after the debate, “and to me, it’s better to hear from the candidates than to hear from the moderator.”

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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For Three New York Lawmakers, Falls From Grace After an Attempted Coup

They were state senators from New York City, Democrats who threw the upper house of the Legislature into chaos after the 2008 election, at a time when Democrats should have been celebrating winning control of the chamber for the first time in more than four decades. Instead, the amigos — a term they bestowed upon themselves — gleefully posed before camera crews and loudly courted both sides of the aisle for perks, power and patronage.

Two of the amigos, Pedro Espada Jr. and Hiram Monserrate, even briefly allied with the Republican caucus in 2009, orchestrating a coup that for a time paralyzed the state government.

Ah, karma.

Now, two amigos — Mr. Monserrate and Carl Kruger — are headed to prison, and the fate of a third, Mr. Espada, is in the hands of a jury after a federal corruption trial. Jurors said Wednesday that they had reached an impasse, but the judge, Frederic Block, instructed them to continue deliberating.

Few of their fellow Democrats are sorry to see them gone from Albany.

“Three are gone,” Senator Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat, said with a broad smile on Wednesday, before walking into the legislative chamber.

Senator Diane J. Savino, a Staten Island Democrat, said: “You almost want to say, I don’t have any sympathy for you. But I’m human, and I don’t wish anybody ill. It’s so frustrating; we were kneecapped by the four of them after Election Day.”

One amigo remains in office: Senator Rubén Díaz Sr., a Pentecostal minister who is one of the Legislature’s most outspoken social conservatives, is unrepentant about their rebellion.

“Never in the history of New York State has there been something so exciting,” Mr. Díaz said. “Never, never, never. That was history. That will go down in the book of history.”

The amigos stole the spotlight in 2008, right after the Democrats won control of the Senate. Only a day after the election, the four lawmakers shocked their colleagues by refusing to commit to backing a member of their own party to lead the chamber.

Three of the four lawmakers are Hispanic, and their stated reason for rebelling was that Latino lawmakers needed a greater voice in government. “We have a black president, a black governor, and we have a concern that we have to be sharing power,” Mr. Díaz said at the time.

Mr. Espada, with his well-tailored suits and unflappable style, seemed particularly to enjoy playing to the cameras. He would tell reporters he was leaning toward supporting a Democrat for leader, then mention he was having dinner with Senator Dean G. Skelos, leader of the Republicans.

Eventually, the amigos agreed to back a Democrat, but for a price. Mr. Kruger was named head of the Senate Finance Committee, and Mr. Espada was made a vice president of the Senate and given the chamber’s top housing post. That was not enough for him. By the following summer, he and Mr. Monserrate had orchestrated a coup by briefly joining with the Republicans.

After Mr. Monserrate returned to the Democrats, the chamber was evenly split and rudderless, culminating with both sides holding dueling sessions at the same time, in the same chamber. Mr. Espada eventually returned to the Democratic fold and claimed the lofty title of majority leader, if not all of that title’s traditional powers.

“What they did is take what should have been a real moment of celebration and turned it on its head, and quite frankly we never recovered from it,” said Ms. Savino, now part of a new splinter group, the Independent Democratic Conference, that has allied with Republican lawmakers.

The fate of the amigos has taken a considerable turn in recent weeks. This month, Mr. Monserrate pleaded guilty to improperly using public money to finance a failed political campaign, acknowledging that he was guilty of mail fraud and mail fraud conspiracy. He was ousted from the Senate in 2010 after a conviction for domestic assault.

In April, Mr. Kruger was sentenced to seven years in prison by a federal judge; he had been accused of accepting more than $1 million in bribes from two hospital executives, a lobbyist and a health care consultant.

Mr. Espada faces charges of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a nonprofit health care network to support his lavish lifestyle. And he was recently ordered to pay $80,000 worth of fines and restitution by a legislative ethics commission, which said he had violated state law by hiring his uncle to join his official staff.

Mr. Díaz remains bitter about Mr. Espada’s fate. He says he believes that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, when he was still attorney general, overreached in corruption cases that he brought against Mr. Espada.

“I think that Pedro Espada was targeted,” Mr. Díaz said. “Why would Andrew Cuomo accuse him of stealing $14 million? Why? Because it was a vendetta.”

Of the other two amigos, he said, “I will continue being a friend and praying for them, and anything that they need, I will be there for them.”

Senator Neil D. Breslin, an Albany Democrat, said: “Neither Democrats nor Republicans should have embraced Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate. We all share in the guilt of doing that. Shame on us.”

But Senator Eric L. Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat, was more forgiving. “Our caucus, unlike the Republican caucus, we don’t look alike, sound alike; it’s extremely diverse,” he said, alluding to the fact that the Republican caucus is exclusively white. “I don’t think they hurt our conference; they added flavor to our conference, a flavor that’s missing from the guys across the aisle.”

Mosi Secret contributed reporting.

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