Barack Obama is very good at things like yesterday’s press conference. He’s too sleek to be trapped by a arduous question, and reporters know there are about three years and nine months left in this term, and they don’t want him sidelined during that time.
Before we leave, I have some tactical suggestions for the staff.
It would be useful to include an arrow on the list of reporters to be addressed to indicate which third of the room the reporter is in, so that the President of the United States doesn’t look like Ben Stein looking for Ferris Bueller in his high school economics class, which, incidentally, that’s what it sounded like.
He needs to find a recent expression to replace “a whole series of…”. Last night we heard about “a whole bunch”: banks, adjustments, problems for veterans, people, things and steps; as transcribed by the NY Times.
Tell him he can’t get incensed when a reporter presses him. From the transcription:
President: Okay. Ed Henry. Where’s Ed? Here he is. [Bueller? Bueller?]
CNN’s Ed Henry asked why New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo appears to be doing more about AIG bonuses than the administration and why “you didn’t immediately go public with your outrage?” But then, because he couldn’t assist himself, Ed asked the President if he thought he would leave a huge deficit for his daughters.
The CEO chose to answer question 1B and skipped AIG’s question. When Henry turned around and asked him again why it took so long for his outrage to fester, Obama said:
Well, it took us a few days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I say anything. All right?
The transcript said (laughter), but to me it sounded more like (nervous chuckle).
A predictor of Henry’s response was a question from CBS’ Chip Reid about the $2.3 trillion debt gap between the administration’s estimate and that of the Congressional Budget Office. “Some Republicans,” he said, “have called your budget… the most irresponsible budget in American history.”
Obama may have sat in the Oval Office and promised to usher in a post-partisan era, but his response was:
First, I suspect some of these Republican critics have low memories because, as I recall, I inherited a $1.3 trillion annual deficit from them.
Now let’s go back to January 3, 2007, when John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives after the 2006 midterm elections.
oh! What? Nancy Pelosi became speaker? And the Democrats controlled the House? And the Senate? And they have been controlling the budget committees for the last two years? So the Democrat-controlled Congress adopted a “$1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit”?
Well, what Republicans in Congress could President Obama have been talking about? It had to be those Republican chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees, Republican Rep. John Spratt (D-SC) and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND).
The AIG contracts went into effect while Republicans Barney Frank (D-MA) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) held control of the House and Senate banking committees. The same two Working Man Guardians would oversee the SEC while Bernie Madoff played Bernie Ripoff.
In response to a question about the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the President said: “We know one thing: the status quo is unsustainable.”
Those damn Republicans in Congress again. There, they ran the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee day after day, unable to break the status quo.
Say, who was the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the last two years?
Oh, yes. Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE).
