In 15 minutes, Barack Obama will offer a rarity: an open press conference. In the past 14 months, this will only be his third, counting from the disastrous July 2009 presser in which he claimed that Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in the Henry “Skip” Gates arrest. His only other open press conference since then came in June to address the Gulf oil spill, six weeks after it began and only when his numbers began plummeting from the fallout.
Once again, Obama faces a moment in which he cannot avoid the press. The economy has tanked over “Recovery Summer,” and its failure has dragged down his party’s prospects of controlling the agenda on Capitol Hill for the next two years. While Obama rested on Martha’s Vineyard, Democrats began openly grousing that the party’s nominal leader had gone AWOL on the economy, instead sending Joe Biden out on a Chip Diller tour, something the media noticed, too. The White House admitted that Obama needed to be more out front on the economy, but couldn’t figure out when and where to make it happen. They tried shoehorning the economy into Obama’s war speech from the Oval Office, but he wound up sounding incoherent on both issues instead.
What can we expect from today’s presser? Obama will hammer Republicans on their reluctance to pass a small-business stimulus, prompted by Harry Reid’s restrictions on amendments to the bill in the Senate, and tout his latest package of tax credits and more public-sector spending. Will the press ask tough questions about both, such as Obama’s plan to pay for business tax credits with higher business taxes elsewhere, and the failure of public-sector spending last year to generate any mid- to long-term economic growth? Or will they let Obama off the hook by asking about the Ground Zero mosque and the idiotic Koran-burning exercise in Florida? I’m guessing a mix of both, and lengthy, meandering, filibuster answers from Obama to keep the number of questions to a minimum.
If you’re inclined to play Obama Speech Bingo, check out the card that Sarjex created in the Green Room!
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