Purpose of Debate Moderator

Before last night, if asked, I would have said I was in favor of fact-checking during a debate.  I think it would push candidates to make sure they got their facts right.  Someone might argue that candidates can fact check each other, but anyone watching the debate and following the post-debate fact checks will realize that all of the candidates have some combination of outright lies/misrepresentations, flip-flopping, inaccurate statistics, and true statistics that tell only part of the story.

If anything, the moderator should point out outright lies/misrepresentations.  The problem with the moderator not doing it is that it's left up to news organizations to do, but I doubt that these conclusions have nearly as much impact as during the debate.  Crowley's siding with Obama on Libya was immensely damaging to Mitt Romney (she also said Romney was correct on another point, but the effect was that Romney was mostly wrong and Crowley was throwing him a bone).  It turns out Romney was right and Crowley and Obama were wrong.  If you look at the transcript, the closest you can get to Obama's argument was that he implied that it was a terrorist attack.  He didn't explicitly call it one.  Dan Gainor hit the nail on the head when he said, "the actual presidential transcript makes it clear that Obama was doing his best to include the word 'terror' without actually saying the incident was a terror attack."

If Crowley hadn't interjected herself, I bet the polls would have indicated a tie.  If moderators don't know the facts, they shouldn't say anything.  They're less informed than I would have expected.