We decided to try to figure out just how late Obama actually is. The way we did that was pretty simple: Every time the president gives prepared public remarks, they are posted on the White House Web site. And, importantly, they’re time-stamped. When he spoke at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit earlier Wednesday, he started at 10:17 a.m. But those remarks were supposed to begin at 10 a.m., according to his public schedule. Ergo, Obama was 17 minutes late. We pulled every time-stamped speech in 2014 and compared it to the schedule. Not everything on his schedule had time-stamped remarks, and vice versa, so we only included those events for which we had both pieces of data.
What we found: Obama has been a cumulative 2,121 minutes late to events in 2014. That’s 35 hours, 21 minutes — or almost a day and a half — that his audiences have been waiting for him to speak. That’s for a lot of events, though. On average, he is 11 minutes late to scheduled speaking appointments.
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