So, some personal drama took me out of circulation for a few days. Haven’t been paying much attention to events … anything new happen? Do’h!

Daily Beast — Raddatz says her approach was to “try to react to what they’re saying.” On Good Morning America Friday morning, the ABC correspondent said, “Sure, I had a lot of follow-ups written, I had a lot of questions written. But when you’re there, you’re in the moment, you really have to go with what’s happening. So when they were talking to each other, when they were going after each other, you do, you want to step back from that. Yet when I hear things, I think, I gotta jump in there, I gotta jump in.”

That she did.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Raddatz’s moderation in Kentucky on Thursday night was the way she used her knowledge as a veteran foreign affairs correspondent and onetime White House reporter to pin down the candidates. When Biden dismissed Ryan’s indictment of the Obama foreign policy as “a bunch of malarkey,” Raddatz pressed him to “be specific”—an admonition she repeated several times. And she could be a stern schoolmarm: “I want to move on here to Medicare and entitlements. I think we’ve gone over this quite enough.” You could imagine her ready to rap knuckles with a ruler.

Turns out a decent moderator makes a huge difference. Whocodanodeit?