(Latimes).Tuesday morning The Ticket examined the White House's current political strategy and asked the question who would show up at Barack Obama's second nationally-televised news conference that evening: the president or the senator?
And if you remember one of those required college lecture courses in the large auditorium at 8:10 a.m. listening to a droning don, and how it felt, slumped in the cushy seats having skipped breakfast for an extra 13 minutes of ZZZZ.
This is the problem with trying to drive the political debate by scheduling a primetime news conference nearly a week in advance. It gets superseded by events, especially by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's financial package finally.
True, Obama created real problems in his first national news conference by promising Geithner would deliver too much the next day. And when the inarticulate bureaucrat didn't, the markets plummeted.
But this news conference seemed anticlimatic. At times the president appeared to be mailing in his delivery.
He made no notable news, and did so quite smoothly. Unless sticking by his guns over cutting charitable deductions is news.
And the former constitutional law professor did go on in his answers, perhaps not by accident. Holding the floor is another means of control for any president. Like males hold the TV remotes.
The result: only 13 questions in 57 minutes.
And as The Ticket noted during its live-blogging, not one single question on either war, including the one the commander-in-chief recently ordered 17,000 more Americans to march into.
Gone from the presidential podium were the ubiquitous, much-noted teleprompters that gave rise to embarrassing suggestions that Obama needs to be fed his words to avoid Special Olympics or Nancy Reagan gaffes. In the twin teleprompters' place? A larger teleprompter in the back of the room where no one watching on TV could see it.
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