For someone who sparkles on stage under the klieg lights as much as President Obama does, it might seem odd that he suddenly suffers from stage fright when it comes to holding a news conference.
For those keeping score at home, the last formal presidential news conference came on May 27th of this year-which if you remember- dealt primarily with the BP oil spill and the hardship being felt by residents in the Gulf Coast.
Two years into office, President Obama has held a grand total of 36 press conferences, according to Dr. Eric Ostermeier, author of the Smart Politics blog at the University of Minnesota, averaging 1.86 press conferences a month, which places him 10th on a list of presidential rankings of press conferences; below JFK , Bill Clinton and both Bushes (41 and 43), while above Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter as compared with presidents from Herbert Hoover through the present. For the record, Ronald Reagan has held the least amount of press conferences, totaling 46 with a monthly average of 0.48, while FDR held the most with 881, averaging 6.05 a month.
Of course, these numbers include joint press conferences and trips abroad. So many don’t really consider that a true representation of how many press conferences the president has held.
To get a better sense of the solo formal press conferences and to find out how many press conferences have been held in prime-time, I poked around at the database maintained by Gerhard Peters at the American Presidency Project, (UC Santa Barbara) and found that President Obama held six formal press conferences in 2009 and three in 2010; four of those nine press conferences were in prime-time, the first on February 9, 2009 and the last prime-time formal press conference came on July 22, 2009.
When Obama first broke from the gate, he seemed to be shattering the old rusty tradition of rarely watched afternoon press conferences by opening up the line of questioning to reporters in prime time. And viewers seemed taken with these evening exchanges. Nearly 50 million viewers tuned into the president’s prime time press conferences on February 9, 2009, then about 40 million on March 24th, 2009, according to Nielsen Media Research.
It all seemed to be going so smoothly for the White House. Obama was breaking new ground by holding press conferences in the evening, giving him maximum attention, when the young and old, the far left and the far right and those important independents in the middle would be home to watch Obama engage the press with aplomb much like FDR and JFK were so famous for.
It all came crashing down on July 22, 2009, when President Obama made the fateful decision to cut his answer short to Steve Koff of The Plain Dealer so that Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times could ask the final question of the evening. Instead of ending the press conference on health care and his planned trip to the Cleveland Clinic the next day, the president ended the evening answering a question about Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., and race relations in America in which Obama wandered off message to say the Cambridge police acted ``stupidly’’ in arresting the popular Harvard professor for disorderly conduct.
I’m sure this isn’t exactly how Robert Gates, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod drew it up for the president on the blackboard before he walked out in the East Room of the White House on that muggy July evening.
As most will recall, the Skip Gates question was a fiasco for the White House that took attention away from their push for health care reform, while Obama backtracked on his statement which culminated in a beer summit at the White House with Gates, Obama and the arresting officer, Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley.
It was another teachable moment, to be sure. The biggest lesson the White House learned from this teachable moment had nothing to do with Gates, Crowley, police departments, or race relations in America for that matter; but rather to keep the president out of prime time news conferences at all costs. And if Rahm and Co. thought they could get away without holding any daytime news conferences they’d probably go for it.
The White House strategy now seems to be place the president in a more controlled setting, by granting exclusives to likes of George Stephanopoulos, Diane Sawyer, and Brian Williams; while having the president tour the country to town hall meetings, ostensibly to listen to the concerns from middle America, but in reality these pep rallies are nothing more than dog and pony shows to get the presidents picture splashed on the local page one’s and on the evening news.
The question the White House has to start asking themselves is if keeping the president away from a prying press corps is helping or hurting the president in the long run?
The conventional wisdom is that Obama is at his best when delivering issue-oriented speeches, like health care, and the Middle East, but as soon as he drifts away from the text written in front of him, trouble lurks, such as when he’s caught off guard answering questions about race in America or mosques being built two blocks north of Ground Zero.
Alex Jones, Director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University doesn’t think the Skip Gates fiasco is the reason Mr. Obama steers away from formal news conferences. ``But I don’t know what their thinking is’’ Jones wrote me in an email. `` It is a mistake, to my mind, because one of his real problems has been getting his message out, and that is the most effective way.’’
Eleanor Clift, a Newsweek columnist and an occasional panelist on the McLaughlin Group, on the other hand, thinks the Skip Gates question has everything to do with Obama avoiding news conferences like the plague. ``Obama wants to stay on message’’, Clift wrote, ``and not hand his critics and the 24/7 media something else to batter him about’’. An hour long press conference serves up too many side issues that could end up as major distractions.’’
While there is plenty of debate whether it’s been wise to keep the president away from going eyeball- to-eyeball with the press on a more regular basis, one thing is certain: the gulf growing between the president and the voters seem to be getting wider. Sticking to a ``Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’’ policy with the media seems to be hurting the president more than he thinks.
With the jobless rate near 10 percent, our policy in Afghanistan and the war against Al Qaeda still fuzzy to many Americans, and a majority of voters (especially independents) disapproving of the way Obama is performing in the White House, the sooner the president gets back to answering tough questions directly from the press with more regularity, the more it will drive home the point that this president isn’t running away from its original billing; that of being an administration of transparency and open government.
It’s time for Mr. Obama to turn the page.
-Bill Lucey
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