President Obama has now gone longer than President Bush ever did between formal news conferences, the Washington Times reports today:
President George W. Bush’s longest stretch between prime-time, nationally televised press conferences was 214 days, from April 4 to Nov. 4, 2004. Mr. Obama tops that record on Monday, going 215 days - stretching back to July 22, according to records kept by CBS Radio’s veteran reporter Mark Knoller.
When I first launched this blog almost a year ago (!), I wrote quite a bit about how the White House was misusing (in part by overusing) the power of a presidential news conference. (In fact, my first post was in response to one of his primetime press conferences.)
News conferences are good for explaining complex policies and turning the page on unpleasant events. They are not very good for driving a message, since the questions and answers are too unpredictable and process-oriented. But since a news conference is also the only way a President can sustain an hour of live primetime coverage to discuss domestic policy without convening a joint session of Congress (which he eventually also did in the health care campaign), early on the White House used several press conferences to try and drive their health care message. Not surprisingly, this approach backfired, and in the third (and final) press conference, the President’s last answer knocked his agenda seriously off-message. Recalls the Times:
The president has seemingly shunned formal, prime-time sessions since his last disastrous presser, when he said police in Cambridge, Mass., “acted stupidly” by arresting a Harvard professor who broke into a home that turned out to be his own. The off-the-cuff comment took over the news cycle for a week, overshadowing his push for health care reform, and culminated in a White House “Beer Summit,” where the president hosted white police officer James Crowley and the black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr.
But it now appears that the White House has over-corrected for over-using formal press conferences last summer. Granted, the networks would never give the President another hour of primetime coverage in the middle of sweeps and the Olympics, and the benefits of hosting a mid-day press conference are diminished. But considering how well the President normally does at the formal news conferences, and how he’s exhausted the salience of one-on-one interviews (seriously, has any national TV reporter not interviewed the President yet?), the long-gap in formal press conferences seems like a mistake.
