The President Vs. the Press

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Ron Edmonds / AP Photo Last night’s press conference showed Obama’s long-term thinking at odds with the media’s short-term baiting. So who’s in control here?

Viewed from above, it would be easy to cast last night as a kind of psychodrama that pitted Obama’s intentions—fixing the multiple messes he inherited from the Bush administration and reorienting America’s priorities in a direction of greater equity and sustainability in the face of a massive economic crisis and growing populist outrage—versus the press corps’ desire to exploit that outrage to get Obama to blow his cool, show some emotion, and make some noise.

The key moment came when CNN’s Ed Henry tried to stir up some trouble. Here’s his question:

Thank you, Mr. President. You spoke again at the top about your anger about AIG. You’ve been saying that for days now. But why is it that it seems Andrew Cuomo seems to be, in New York, getting more actual action on it? And when you and Secretary Geithner first learned about this, 10 days, two weeks ago, you didn’t go public immediately with that outrage. You waited a few days, and then you went public after you realized Secretary Geithner really had no legal avenue to stop it.

This is a presidency defined by cable news food-fights and Maureen Dowd-style armchair psychoanalysis.

And more broadly—I just want to follow up on Chip [Reid] and Jake [Tapper]—you’ve been very critical of President Bush doubling the national debt. And to be fair, it’s not just Republicans hitting you. Democrat Kent Conrad, as you know, said, quote, “When I look at this budget, I see the debt doubling again.” You keep saying that you’ve inherited a big fiscal mess. Do you worry, though, that your daughters, not to mention the next president, will be inheriting an even bigger fiscal mess if the spending goes out of control?

Note both Henry’s tone and content. First off, the question has no relationship to substance. Instead it’s about

a) An alleged political horserace between Andrew Cuomo and Obama that, as far as I can tell, does not exist

b) Why Obama “waited a few days” before “go[ing] public with that outrage?”

c) And following up on his bros “Chip and Jake,” he wants to know, why isn’t Obama’s budget enjoying universal praise, as “it’s not just Republicans hitting” him, but a conservative Democrat is as well.

Obama tried to explain the relationship between the priorities of his budget and the recovery he predicts, as well as the eventual reduction in the deficit he both inherited and will be increasing. But because Obama, unlike George W. Bush, decided to allow follow-up questions, which vastly reduces the ability to dodge questions he does not like, Henry was able to focus again, laser-like, on the president’s refusal to act out about AIG as quickly as Henry would have liked, and again raised the so-far nonexistent Cuomo vs. Obama contest: “So on AIG, why did you wait—why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage?” and goading him again, into a contest with Cuomo by using that most favored of journalistic weasel words, “seems.” (As Hamlet should have taught us, the word “seems” is a license to make shit up. “Seems madam?” he says to his lying mother, “Nay it is. I know not seems.”) “It seems like the action is coming out of New York in the attorney general’s office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, look, we’re outraged. Why did it take so long?” Obama’s answer: “Well, it took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”

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