The L.A.Times' Andrew Malcolm sums up the snore-fest that was last night's presser:
He made no notable news, and did so quite smoothly. Unless sticking by his guns over cutting charitable deductions is news.
And the former constitutional law professor did go on in his answers, perhaps not by accident. Holding the floor is another means of control for any president. Like males hold the TV remotes.
The result: only 13 questions in 57 minutes.
And as The Ticket noted during its live-blogging, not one single question on either war, including the one the commander-in-chief recently ordered 17,000 more Americans to march into.
Andrew McCarthy notes one verbal tick that the president has developed that warns us of thin-skin ahead.
I watched the late-night replay, having missed the live event while participating in the NRCC's dinner honoring Bobby Jindal at the Building Museum. Most of the congressmen there were optimistic about their increasing ability to be heard by the voting public, largely because the president's budget proposals (see below) are both so astonishingly irresponsible and so disconnected from the economic conditions that worry most voters.
Last night's press conference telegraphed increasing insecurity on the president's part about his budget and about his way forward. Filibusters are not the tactics of the confident, and the defensiveness throughout the Q-and-A underscores President Obama's nervousness that large parts of his own party in Congress are revolting from the prospect of this massive lurch towards wild spending in support of half-baked dreams of remaking the country.
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