The president seemed rather surly during Wednesday’s news conference. He threw in the usual blather about wanting to work with Republicans and being very eager to hear their ideas, which is the part that was played in a short radio report we heard which characterized the whole affair as very conciliatory, but through most of it he seemed to be itching for a fight.
Perhaps he had just grown rusty at the question-and-answer routine after eight months without a formal news conference. During the intervening time he’s given plenty of interviews, but most have been with the likes of Entertainment Tonight, The Daily Show, The View, the Pimp with a Limp’s radio program, and other venues appropriate to a man of his celebrity, and the questions mostly concerned such matters as the super power he would most like to possess or his opinion regarding the feud between two judges on some televised amateur talent contest or another. Even when the president dared to submit to questioning by supposedly more serious journalists, he could usually count on them to not bring up anything that might prove embarrassing.
Much of Wednesday’s “presser” was similarly polite. One reporter invited the president to muse on the “mandate” earned by his “overwhelming victory,” an odd description of an election that saw the president’s totals decline by millions of votes and his winning margin shrink to just above 50 percent, and another obliged the president by asking about his efforts to save the planet from global warming. Yet another reporter offered his congratulations on the election, and the usual collegial chuckling generally prevailed.
There was simply no getting around the ever-expanding scandals that have followed the deadly terror attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya, however, and it was at this point that the president started getting snippy. The opening question concerned the resignation of Gen. David Petraeus as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and was politely framed by the assumption that Obama knew nothing of an investigation into Petraeus’ affair until after the election, and Obama dodged the question by citing an ongoing investigation and heaping fulsome praise on the defenestrated general. That was followed some tax talk and the Telemundo correspondent’s inevitable concern about immigration, then a follow up to the unanswered question about Petraeus that clearly annoyed the president.
When a reporter asked about statements by Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham that they would block a rumor appointment of United Nations ambassador Susan Rice to be the next Secretary of State, in part because she had played a leading role in peddling the administration’s bogus story that the Benghazi attack had been a spontaneous mob reaction to an obscure YouTube video, Obama’s annoyance turned to anger. Waxing indignant that anyone would criticize Rice for following his orders, he angrily demanded that “They should come after me.” It would have been delightful to see Obama’s reaction when he heard that Graham later defiantly told reporters that he had every intention of going after the president on the matter, but it apparently happened during a rare off-camera moment.
Obama was similarly pugnacious when talking about raising taxes on the rich, clearly a subject dear to his heart. He didn’t even wait for the reporters to ask about it, devoting much of his typically overlong opening statement to the issue, and at a later point used it to abruptly change the subject from a pesky question about the families of the men killed in Benghazi. The president claims that a vast majority of Americans share his desire to wring a few billion more bucks out of the wealthy, which might or might not be true, Whatever the merits of Obama’s argument, which strikes us as laughably weak, his political opponents should take note that he’s angrily serious about it.
The president’s many acolytes will take all this as evidence of a fighting spirit, which they no doubt feel is required for dealing with those evil Republicans, but it strikes us as mere petulance that is ill-suited to dealing with the nation’s problems.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 