Following up on an item from yesterday, the “mystery” surrounding Mitt Romney, Thursday’s debate, and that odd whisper seems to have been resolved.
If you’re just joining us, Romney was asked whether he’d follow in Reagan’s footsteps on Social Security policy. When Romney paused to answer, the television audience could hear a distinct, audible whisper from someone who says, “Raise taxes” (or, possibly, “raised taxes”). A moment later, Romney said, “I’m not going to raise taxes.”
Adding to the intrigue, MSNBC published an item about the whisper yesterday afternoon, and then removed it without explanation.
Given the speculation, MSNBC responded last night with a more detailed explanation.
While the buzz over the incident was loud enough that Brian Williams, Russert’s co-moderator and anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” felt the need to weigh in, the grassy-knoll types will be disappointed. Romney’s innocent, the network said.
Domenico Montanaro, an NBC News political researcher, wrote on the network’s political blog, First Read: “After reviewing the tapes, NBC determined that an open mic[rophone] picked up a whisper from the audience.
“It is unclear who it is that says it, but it was not said by any of the candidates, was not heard in the hall and, more importantly, not heard by the candidates.”
In case you’re wondering how a microphone could pick up a whisper from someone in the audience (who wasn’t mic’d), Rachel Sklar notes that Paul Tash, editor and chairman of the St. Petersburg Times, had a live microphone, and he was sitting in the audience at the time.
And what of the missing MSNBC’s First Read item, which was published online and then yanked without disclosure? There’s a reasonable explanation for that, too.
There has been a lot of confusion over a whispered moment from last night’s debate — someone saying what we believe was “not raise taxes” after a question from Tim Russert on Reagan and social security. We put the following post up last night immediately following what we and several First Read commenters heard.
For full disclosure, the way it works for us when we’re liveblogging is our contributors, who are either on site at the location or in D.C. or elsewhere, will usually send me posts via e-mail. While I am watching the debate, I read the dispatches, post if applicable after quickly editing and put up my own thoughts. Regular e-mail questions get mixed in sometimes. I put this one up, but when I did, Lauren Appelbaum wrote me and said it was not necessarily intended to be a post but actually just a question to me if I knew who made the “taxes” comment. Being in South Carolina, following the Democrats for their primary and not on site in Florida, I didn’t know. We thought it might have simply been our control room cueing a question, which then didn’t seem to warrant a post, since that would be very inside baseball. So, I took it down.
After some of the confusion today, we are putting it back up for those that haven’t seen it.
I have a hunch some will continue to raise questions about all of this, but it seems like a mystery solved, doesn’t it?