Obama Back in Control :: Walter Shapiro

Now that Barack Obama's second prime-time press conference is over, it is safe to make lasting pronouncements about the fledgling president's East Room Q&A style. Normally journalistic convention requires three events to justify a trend, but we are jumping the gun because, frankly, the networks are not likely to pre-empt their lucrative evening programming next month to give Obama a third chance to fail to make news at a news conference. But despite the consistency of Obama's words and themes since taking office, there are intriguing things to be learned about his presidency from his performance last night.

While eclectic and pre-determined list of presidential questioners (including Univision, Ebony magazine, and the privately owned military newspaper Stars and Stripes) reflects the breakdown of traditional media hierarchies, perhaps Obama's boldest decision was to call on Jon Ward from the conservative Washington Times, but to ignore the Washington Post. Ward's question reflected the right-wing refrain (which the president firmly denied) that Obama made his decision to end the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research without ever considering the moral implications of the question. While Obama could not have guessed the precise question, he was seemingly willing to use the Washington Times to demonstrate that he is ready for combat in the ideological zone.

On a substantive level, the press conference provided an intriguing window into Obama's style of argumentation. In the most provocative sound bite of the evening, Obama responded to a question about why was he slow to voice outrage over the AIG bonuses by snapping, "Well, it took a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak." Of course, if cable television news and talk radio followed the Obama Doctrine, there would be long intervals of gape-jawed silence during the broadcast day. Even though a CBS New poll found that a quarter of Democrats and more than 40 percent of independents disapproved of his handling of the AIG tempest, the testiness of the usually self-disciplined president can be seen as sign that he is no longer nearly as worried about an anti-bonus army of angry voters.

It was telling politically that Obama's strongest answers Tuesday night were in defense of his budget--the issue that is almost certain to dominate Congressional debates and the TV talk shows in the weeks ahead. When a questioner invoked Republican outrage over the deficits that even Obama's budget concedes will pass the $7-trillion mark over the next decade (the Congressional Budget Office last Friday estimated $9.3 trillion in red ink), the president commented archly, "I suspect that some of those Republican critics have a short memory, because as I recall, I am inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit, from them."

Beyond the obvious blame-Bush sniping, Obama did an adroit job of explaining that "small differences" in growth-rate assumptions add up to trillions in differing deficit projections over ten years. Obama's most optimistic comments about the projected pace of the economic recovery were not in his budget (or in his Tuesday press conference), but instead were embedded in his talk with Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes" this past weekend. After acknowledging that he had been surprised by the skyrocketing job-loss numbers over the last few months as the recession tore through the economy at record speed, Obama told CBS, "There's a potential silver lining which may be that things are so accelerated now--the modern economy is so entwined and wired--that things happen really fast for ill, but things may recover faster than they have in the past." Clearly, this was an idea that has been floated during economic conversations in the White House rather than something that Obama improvised in the midst of a prime-time interview. But the president's ease with defending his own budget was in contrast to Tim Geithner's off-again-on-again efforts to sell his ever-evolving banking plan to a skeptical Washington.

Desperate for a new topic to replace AIG--and unwilling to spend much time on the policy intricacies of Geithner's latest plan to stabilize the banks--the pundit pack has been huffing and puffing for the last few days about the tragic dangers of Obama being "over-exposed." There is something comic, of course, when reporters complain that the president is spending too much time answering questions in public. But Tuesday night's press conference also buttresses the counter-argument: Each of these prime-time public performances by President Obama serve as a way for voters to become comfortable with him in the White House at a time of crisis. No one will confuse last night's press conference with FDR's fireside chats. But it is hard for anyone, even Rush-to-judgment conservative talk-radio fans, to doubt that Barack Obama is in charge--and is willing to accept the long-term political consequences of his decisions.

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