[pagebreak]PVN: How did you get into Transcendental Meditation?CC: My TM [Transcendental Meditation] experience started right after the last election. Campaigns are just so hard on everything. You’re on the bus, you’re off the bus, you’re on the plane, you’re in a hotel. And that’s really your life: You think you’re not going to eat and then you eat too much, or you think you are going to eat and you don’t eat enough. You’re just so stressed out and tired.When the 2008 campaign was over, I said, “How about if I promise myself that I will spend a year concentrating on getting healthy and doing the right things? If I hate it and it’s horrible, at the end of the year I’ll just go back and eat crazy.” My friends called it The Year of Candy. I had a friend who said, “You oughta try Transcendental Meditation.” PVN: What’s your TM routine?CC: It’s a relaxation technique. A TM teacher once said to me, “You know when you have a really wavy day on a boat, and you’re getting tossed around and there’s white caps everywhere? That’s kind of where we spend most of our time: on top of the waves.” But if you jump into the water and can get down to the bottom, it’s so still and quiet. That’s where TM is. I just sit in a chair in my room. I meditate in the airport. I meditate in my office in the afternoon. It doesn’t require a special place or even a lack of people. PVN: How do you feel now, compared to your life before the Year of Candy?CC: I feel better. Sustaining a Year of Candy can be difficult in election years, I’ve found. It’s still too easy for me to go, “If I could just have that extra hour of sleep, I’d be really happy.” I’m not good at coming home at 8 o’clock at night and running on the treadmill. I say this all the time to a guy that I work out with: “I want to love this, but I just can’t. I just don’t!” And he says to me all the time, “Just love how it makes you feel afterward. Just keep your mind on that.” That’s the only thing that’s ever going to get you out of bed. PVN: Do you think that meditation has made you a better journalist? CC: I think that it has made my thought process more ordered. When your stress level is lower, you make better decisions and you have a better thought process. Do I still get angry? I do. Do I still get frustrated? I do. Do I still have stress? Yes. I don’t think that’s the point; the point is for you to be able to handle the stress. The point is that I don’t hang onto my anger nearly as long as I used to. It just takes the harsh edges of life and softens them up in a way that you can cope with them. [pagebreak]PVN: You’re the first woman in 20 years to moderate a presidential debate, which is really exciting for all of the ladies out there. What does this mean to you personally? CC: The honest truth is when they first asked me, I didn’t think “Oh, I’m the first woman in 20 years!” I didn’t even think about being a woman at all; I thought about being a journalist. But people kept asking me about it: “Will you ask different questions because you’re a woman?” “Will you do this because you’re a woman?” Well, I don’t know what I do because I’m a woman; I just know what I do because I’m me. It’s just hard for me to separate it. I’ve been a woman all my life. But a young woman came up to me at the convention and hugged me and said, “I’m so excited a woman is doing this.” I looked at her and I realized: The optics matter. It matters for a young woman to be able to look up and think, “I could do that; I could be that.”And the older women were saying, “I look up, and I see you, and I’m so glad you’re doing this.” And I think: If those young women walk away from that debate on October 16 and they’re saying to themselves, “I can do that,” I’ll be happy. And if the older women walk away from that debate and they think, “Damn, I’m at the top of my game. I can do something cool,” then that’s great. PVN: No matter how tough you are, a lot of women are still intimidated by men in the workplace. That’s obviously not you. How do you think you got the confidence you have? CC: I try to not personalize it, if that makes sense. I say to myself when I’m feeling intimidated—not even necessarily by a man, but by the task—I think, “Dang, this isn’t about me.” With journalism you go, “This isn’t about my story, this isn’t Candy Crowley’s debate. This is Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and the voters’ debate.” And that focuses you on the mission, as opposed to me. And I have confidence in the mission. You have to have confidence in your skill set, even if you think, “Uh oh, this will be the day they really find out I don’t know what I’m doing!” You know, you can be 30 years into your career and think, “This is the day they figure it out.” But you’re there for a reason.PVN: It’s the night before the debate. What’s tonight going to look like for you?CC: Knowing me, I think I’ll be sitting in my hotel room with a stack of papers, making sure I’m up to date on what the last thing everyone has said about things. I’ll meditate, and then I’ll read some more papers, and then I’ll go to bed. I’m hoping that it will be really mellow. By the way, all my kids are going to be in town, so it’s going to be a huge lesson in restraint for me not to want to go out and party with them.PVN: Do you have a moderating mantra?CC: Five minutes before I get on a show, I take deep breaths and settle in. I just say, “Listen,” because that’s the most important part that most people forget. You’ve got to listen to the answers. Otherwise, you’re not having a conversation. And that’s about the last thing I tell myself before I go on air.
