The American Spectator : In All FairnessOne wouldn't know it from reading the Washington Post or New York Times, but some inside the White House don't think that President Barack Obama hit a home run with his first national press conference last week.
"It looked scripted beyond the scripted part, the speech," says one former communications adviser, who has been feeding notes and suggestions to the White House team and worked with them on the inauguration. "Every president has gone into one of these things knowing that there were some pre-arranged questions or journalists to be called on, but this one was pretty ham-handed."
I second that. I watched a replay afterwards and it was painful. The answers were long, rambling, irrelevant. One had the sense that he was stringing words together in his head before spitting them out. Isn't that what everyone does? But this was so obvious.
Let's face it, as good as Obama is on the 'prompter, he's lost without it.
So anyway, this must be fixed and here's the funny part:
To that end, he says, the White House is looking to install a small video or computer screen into the podium used by the president for press conferences and events in the White House. "It would make it easier for the comms guys to pass along information without being obvious about it," says the adviser.
Yeah apparently that guy in the back with the hand chop motion on the neck wasn't quite doing it. But imagine if this was George Bush*, or Sarah Palin*, needing a little "comms help"...
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PD toolbar! *both of which do just fine cold with no script. I've seen them enough to know.
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