ABC’s Terry Moran was caught on-screen Sunday laughing as Barack Obama surrogate Martin O’Malley (D-Md.) bashed presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
When the Nightline host filling in for This Week’s vacationing George Stephanopoulos realized he was on camera, he tempered his glee and put on a more serious face (video follows with transcript and commentary):
TERRY MORAN, SUBSTITUTE HOST: And Governor O'Malley, one of the tough things for the president, as Governor Jindal points out, is that he made promises, so he's had to come before the American people and explain what went wrong. Republicans are having a field day with this. Here's Karl Rove's group, Crossroads GPS, an ad that they have put together with some of those statements. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(UNKNOWN): America's jobless rate is still too high. Barack Obama's got lots of excuses for the bad economy.
OBAMA: Headwinds coming from Europe. We've had a string of bad luck. An earthquake in Japan, an Arab spring. An ATM, you don't go to a bank teller. Some things that we could not control. You go to the airport, and you're using a kiosk. We've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MORAN: You know, Governor O'Malley, obviously, that's political ad, but doesn't Barack Obama own this economy?
GOVERNOR MARTIN O'MALLEY (D-MARYLAND): Well, I think what he owns is the leadership of our country forward. What he owns is the responsibility to do everything in his power to dig us out of the hole that we found ourselves in.
And, look, President Obama is not running against the almighty. He is running against the alternative. And the alternative in this case is Governor Mitt Romney, who had the 47th worst job creation rate as governor and also has a -- a penchant, a talent for offshoring American jobs, sending them overseas, and also maintaining offshore bank accounts in Bermuda, Swiss bank accounts. And so the question he'll have to answer, Terry, is what is his alternative?
In the middle of the following sentence, the screen switched to a split-shot with Moran on the left laughing and smiling:
O’MALLEY: I've never known of a Swiss bank account to build an American bridge, a Swiss bank account to create American jobs, or Swiss bank accounts to rebuild the levees to protect the people of New Orleans. That's not an economic strategy for moving our country forward.
MORAN: All right. Just for the record, I did ask you about President Obama and you ended up attacking Mitt Romney. We...
O'MALLEY: Because this is a choice.
Honestly, if Moran is going to fill in when normal host George Stephanopolous has a day off, maybe he should do a better job of hiding his glee as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is being attacked by an Obama surrogate.
Or is that asking too much?
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— Noel Sheppard (@NoelSheppard) June 9, 2012
