NBC News anchor Chuck Todd is not good at his day job. Unfortunately for everyone involved in the process of selecting the next Democratic candidate for president, the network still saw fit to have him moderate half of the first primary debate on Wednesday night, which went about as well as you could expect.
Todd stumbled through a question on geopolitics so badly that the first candidate, John Delaney, had to ask him to rephrase it. “Biggest geopolitical threat,” he said tersely, before stammering over half of the candidates’ answers.
He also asked nonsense questions on everything from guns to climate change.
Perhaps the best representation of how counterproductive Todd’s performance was at this debate comes from FiveThirtyEight, which broke down exactly how many words each candidate spoke. Turns out Todd managed to get more words in than all but the three top candidates, filling the air with an enormous amount of drivel despite the fact that he was only there for half the debate. Ludicrous:
The technical difficulties that plagued the second half of the debate probably weren’t Todd’s fault, but still. Come on man. Todd is scheduled to take the second half of tonight’s debate once again with Rachel Maddow, hopefully having learned to keep his mouth shut a little bit more and have fewer stupid things come out of it when he opens it. We can dream, right?