Our new president's first press conference got two thumbs down from the press. Alessandra Stanley, who regularly reviews television for the New York Times, and Walter Shapiro, who has covered the last eight presidential elections, found the president long-winded. Ms. Stanley wrote, "Mr. Obama's locutions are steady, fluent and often very long. On Monday night, even his fiercest warnings about the perilous state of the economy were bracketed by professorial disquisitions."
In The New Republic, Shapiro wrote that, with his "lengthy soliloquies...Obama radiated the sense of a leader who has digested too many economic briefings and memorized too many talking points in preparation for his primetime rendezvous with the public." Shapiro supported his point with the calculation that "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."
Shapiro's final tally was even more critical: "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."
Compare that tally to that of one of the famous press conferences conducted by "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf, the commanding general of the first Gulf War, in which he fielded 10 questions in two minutes and forty-eight seconds.
Succinctness counts in Q&A.
So I agree with Ms. Stanley and Mr. Shapiro about the length of Obama's answers, but I must commend him for the way he handled 3 of the 13 that fell into the false assumption question category, aka the "When did you stop beating your wife?" question. There is only one way to handle that kind of question.
Just say, "No."
The first false assumption question in the Obama transcript was the one Shapiro referenced from the Associated Press reporter. AP's Jennifer Loven cited Obama's statement earlier that same day that the economic crisis might be irreversible, and then asked him, "Do you think that you risk losing some credibility or even talking down the economy by using dire language like that?"
Obama's first four words, "No, no, no no."
Chip Reid asked, "Did you underestimate how hard it would be to change the way Washington worked?"
The president replied, "I don't think I underestimated it. I don't think the American people underestimated it."
Chuck Todd of NBC, asked the third false assumption question, "You talked about that if your plan works the way you want it to work, it's going to increase consumer spending. But isn't consumer spending, or over-spending, how we got into this mess? And if people get money back into their pockets, do you not want them saving it or paying down debt first, before they start spending money into the economy?"
Obama said "no" again. "Well, first of all, I don't think it's accurate to say that consumer spending got us into this mess. What got us into this mess initially were banks taking exorbitant, wild risks with other people's monies, based on shaky assets."
The next time anyone asks you when you stopped beating your wife, you don't have to be the President of the United States and evoke executive privilege; just say, "No."