Crowley has indicated that she intends to play an active role in the debate. | POLITICO Screen grab Crowley: 'I'm not a fly on the wall'

The town hall debate is the one presidential face-off in which the audience gets to ask the questions.

But don’t tell that to moderator Candy Crowley.


Like any journalist worthy of the assignment, Crowley concedes that the debate on Tuesday night isn’t about her, but she just as eagerly acknowledges her role in it.

( Also on POLITICO:Candy Crowley to defy debate contract)

“I understand that I’m there. I’m not a fly on the wall,” she told POLITICO recently. “We don’t want the candidates to spout talking points. That doesn’t help voters … I’m going to react organically to what’s happening.”

In a move that has unnerved both campaigns, Crowley, the host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” is indicating she intends to play an active role in a debate meant to be dictated by an audience of independent voters.

“Once the table is kind of set by the town hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about x, y, z?’” Crowley told CNN earlier this month.

( Also on POLITICO: 5 things to watch at the debate)

These remarks and others have upset both campaigns, according to a new report by Time magazine’s Mark Halperin and confirmed by POLITICO. “In a rare example of political unity,” Halperin reports, “both the Romney and the Obama campaigns have expressed concern to the Commission on Presidential Debates about how the moderator of the Tuesday town hall has publicly described her role.”

Per the commission, the questions asked at Tuesday’s debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., are to be determined by an audience of undecided voters. Crowley’s role, according to the contract signed by both campaigns, is limited to “managing” the discussion. She is not supposed to “rephrase the question or open a new topic,” “ask follow-up questions” “or otherwise intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period.”

Rules be damned: Crowley has given every indication that she intends to assert herself in the debate.

( PHOTOS: Presidential debate moderators)

In another interview, on Oct. 11, Crowley told CNN, “The nice thing will be, if the town hall person asks about apples, and they answer oranges, I get to say, ‘Wait a second, the question was about apples — let’s talk about that.”

Crowley’s aggressive approach is not without precedent. During 2008’s town-hall debate, NBC’s Tom Brokaw reworded many of the questions from the audience and was criticized for it.

But Crowley enters this year’s town-hall debate in a unique position. For one, she follows in the footsteps of ABC’s Martha Raddatz, the moderator of last week’s vice presidential debate, who exhibited control and authority where her own predecessor, PBS’s Jim Lehrer, exhibited powerlessness and laxity. In the shadow of Raddatz, Crowley will be expected to exert a similar command of the conversation.

( Also on POLITICO: Simpson: I hope Crowley follows up)

Crowley is also the first woman to moderate a presidential debate in 20 years, and the second in presidential debate history. She says it doesn’t matter — “My first reaction was not that I’m a woman, because that’s always been a part of me,” she told POLITICO in an interview last week — but the honor comes with inevitable responsibility. Voters will be looking to Crowley to insert a female perspective into the conversation.

And yet, like Carole Simpson 20 years ago, Crowley has been given the one presidential debate in which the moderator is meant to play an almost inconsequential role.

“I was not a moderator in the sense of Jim Lehrer. I was not able to ask my own questions,” Simpson, the moderator of the 1992 town hall debate between President George H.W. Bush, Gov. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, told POLITICO earlier this year. “As a town hall moderator, I was told in my ear which audience member to go to next. I had no power at all in choosing the people, in what question would be asked.”

Crowley, a veteran political reporter, has never been a doormat. Moreover, as moderator of CNN’s Sunday program since 2010, she is used to interrogating politicians, and very much wired-in to the 2012 presidential campaign. Where Lehrer and Raddatz approached the moderator’s chair from outside the bubble of day-to-day politics — albeit from different realms — Crowley exists within that bubble, and thrives off it. The idea that she would completely cede her 90 minutes of fame to the audience — or to the candidates, as Lehrer did — seems all but impossible.

“I’m not unaware that Jim [Lehrer], took a lot of incoming,” she said. “As moderator, you’re going to criticized, period. Beyond that, you have to plow ahead. You can’t ask, ‘Do you pull your punches? Do you throw your punches?’ Because you’re going to take heat.”

Inherent in that statement is an acknowledgment that she has punches to throw. If recent weeks are any indication, Crowley is welcoming of the limelight. More than Lehrer, Raddatz and CBS’s Bob Schieffer, the moderator of the third and final presidential debate, Crowley has been out in front of the camera, willing to give interview after interview describing her attitudes and approach toward the debate, regardless of the modesty displayed by her predecessors.

Crowley has appeared on CNN time and again to discuss the debate and recently gave a tour of her home to The New York Times Magazine. (Asked for “debate goal,” she replied, “Surprise me. Don’t make it so that I know what you’re going to say. That is what I most want out of both these guys. Sit back, drop your 12 points and surprise me with an answer.”)

But that is not to say that Crowley doesn’t take the responsibility seriously. Indeed, she went to Denver two weeks ago to observe that debate first-hand.

Crowley is also experiencing the requisite amount of stress. She is practicing transcendental meditation, but even that can’t stem off the anxiety. If anything can, it’s the reassurance that, once on stage, she isn’t expected to do much more than hold the microphone and monitor the clock.

“In a way, knowing this debate is all about the candidates is something I tell myself to deal with the stress,” she told POLITICO. “I tell myself, ‘Relax this is about getting these guys to talk. It’s not about you.’”