Last Sunday CBS's Things That Matter welcomed Maryland Governor and possible Presidential candidate, Democrat Wes Moore to their Town Hall. Aside from expecting, and hearing the usual questions tossed at a Democrat, there was a waiting game involved as well. Waiting to see if Host Norah O'Donnell would confront Moore about recent revelations made in the Free Beacon, which call into question details of his life story which he has told over and over again.
It wasn't until some 49 minutes into the hour session that O'Donnell got around to addressing the accusations. This came right after she asked Moore if he would run for President, and he said no. She began by calling the publication a "conservative outlet", as if to diminish the stories, something Moore would pick up on, and her fist question concerned doubts about his alleged Oxford thesis.
O'DONNELL: You are a rising star in the Democratic Party, and if you run for president, there's gonna be a lot of questions about your biography and your resume. And that has already started. The conservative outlet The Washington Free Beacon has published a number of stories. We want to give you an opportunity to respond to some claims. First, you were selected a Rhodes scholar and attended Oxford University. That's a big deal, congratulations. Oxford says it is not have a copy of your thesis. Did you submit it, any idea why it is missing?
MOORE: I think Oxford has said that I have completed my degree. There is no denying that. And that I received a Master's Degree at Oxford University in International Relations after being the first African American Rhodes Scholar in the history of Johns Hopkins University. So there is no denying that....If there's a couple things that the people of this state know about me, it's that I am a person of honor and integrity, I take that very seriously. I was raised right by my family, and I was trained right by the army. So when I am watching this game of politics, frankly this is what I think people hate about politics so much, it's the politics of personal destruction. Where as a person who has nothing to be ashamed of or nothing to exaggerate about my life, that this is the thing that conservative right-wing blogs want to attack, particularly when it is something that Oxford University has verified already...Because the people know that if I said I meant it. And there's never a question about my integrity.
He never answered the question. There was no follow-up from O'Donnell. There should have been. What the Free Beacon piece reported is that Moore claimed that his thesis, The Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere, had made him an expert, and led to a White House Fellowship in 2006, where he was a special assistant to Secretary Of State Condoleezza Rice, which led eventually to his becoming Governor.
From there she moved on to another report by the Free Beacon.
O'DONNELL: They are also raising questions.. it's something you wrote about in your book and you've about talked on the campaign stump, that your great-grandfather was run out of South Carolina in the 1920s by the KKK. The Free Beacon is casting doubt on that with church records, can you address that?
MOORE: The same right-wing blog? I can. I can address the fact that I'm the grandson of someone who was born in South Carolina, and when he was just a child, the Ku Klux Klan... ran my family out. And not out of South Carolina, they ran them out of the United States of America and they went to Jamaica. And much of my family has always said they would never come back to this country... My grandfather came back to this country, he got his degree from Lincoln University, an HBCU in Pennsylvania. He became a minister, just like his father, and he became the first black Minister in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church. I know my family's history. So if some blog has a question about the clans history, maybe they should ask the Ku Klux Klan.
Nothing about his great-grandfather at all. Again, Moore did not answer the question. No wonder he says he won't run for President. And the best O'Donnell could do was muster, "Alright." I'm not kidding, and unfortunately neither was she.
