UNFORTUNATELY FOR HIM...:

Obama Owns the Room (Michael Lind, 2/10/09, Daily Beast)

His prepared remarks were terrible.

He began with the biggest cliché of modern politics—he had met some real Americans, outside the Beltway, and learned from their wisdom. After recounting his photo-op visit to distressed Elkhart, Indiana, the new president then reeled off a list of goals for the stimulus package that sounded more like campaign rhetoric in a high-school gymnasium than a serious plan in the White House: four million jobs, college tax credits, wind turbines, and solar energy.

But the worst was yet to come. Speaking to a nation that longs for leadership, he boasted of bipartisanship, as though anyone cares about process in an emergency. The legislation, the president claimed, was supported by “both the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO…both Democrats and Republicans…” To be sure, the president knew his audience of White House reporters, who share the Beltway subculture’s bizarre obsession with bipartisanship for its own sake. In fact, two of the reporters in the question period earnestly asked whether Obama was being bipartisan enough. (I don’t recall George W. Bush being asked similar questions; perhaps only Democrats are expected to divide the fruits of electoral victory evenly with the party that the voters rejected.)

A viewer who changed the channel after Obama had hurried through his prepared remarks might have had cause for concern about the occupant of the Oval Office. But in the question-and-answer period that followed, a different Obama emerged—a leader whose combination of articulateness, passion and mastery of policy detail is unrivalled among his recent predecessors, with the exception of Bill Clinton.

...presidents who do well in press conferences--Nixon, Carter, GHW Bush, Clinton--tend to be ineffective precisely because all they're really good at is mastery of minor details. Our best presidents--Reagan and W--scare the heck out of you in press conferences because you half expect them to just pass on questions about particulars that they clearly know nothing about, but excel at set-pieces where they spell out a vision for the country and their administration.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2009 3:31 PM