PRESS CONFERENCE….Longtime reporter Walter Shapiro was decidedly unimpressed with President Obama’s press conference last night:
Through most of his inaugural primetime press conference, Barack Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. The president’s response to the first question from the Associated Press about the risks of sounding too apocalyptic about the economy ran (or, to be more accurate, crawled) for nearly 1,200 words.
….What Obama was decidedly not Monday night was Kennedy-esque. When JFK unveiled the live presidential primetime press conference 48 years ago, he answered 37 questions in the space of 40 minutes; Obama only half-responded to 13 questions in the space of an hour….As a result, the reporters and their questions were little more than potted palms as President Obama declaimed from the East Room.
I confess that this was my initial reaction too: Obama seemed to ramble and hesitate endlessly last night. But I wonder if that’s a reaction unique to someone who pays a lot of attention to politics and has heard all this stuff before? In the same way that Beltway types never liked Bill Clinton’s longwinded State of the Union addresses, but ordinary voters did, I wonder if ordinary voters appreciated Obama’s long, serious answers more than guys like Shapiro and me? I can’t say for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
