Obama hasn’t held a full press conference in over eight months. He did not take questions during his post-election victory statement, and relegated the lapdog media to the corner during that one. It will be interesting to see if Obama gets tough questions, as The Politico’s Maggie Budoff Brown and Josh Gerstein posit, or get his usual softball questions
This is not what the White House wanted for President Barack Obama’s first news conference of his second term.
He won’t be able to dwell much on his stronger-than-expected victory or even press his agenda for the next four years. Instead, he’ll be diverted by a Washington sex scandal.
But, Obama is the master of speaking and speaking and speaking, droning on and on and on when asked a question he doesn’t like, shifting topics, and rarely answering the question, which reduces the number of questions that can be asked. Anyhow, the story offers 7 questions
- Do you believe the FBI should have told you and Congress sooner about the investigation that led Gen. Petraeus to resign? (I think the follow up question should be “if you are saying you weren’t told, what the hell is going on in your administration that would cause the POTUS to be left out of the loop when the Director of the CIA is being investigated by the CIA?”)
- Do you worry about a culture in which trusted officials behave badly? Does this administration consider anyone who’s having an extramarital affair, or has had one in the past, to be unfit for public office? (do you think “walking” guns with no intention to track them, resulting in the deaths of 2 federal agents and hundreds of Mexican civilians a bright idea?)
- On the fiscal cliff, is your bottom line rates or revenue? Is it enough to close tax loopholes and deductions on the wealthy, or must tax rates also go up in order for you to sign a deal? (Why would you send Susan Rice out to lie about what Benghazi was about, and then you do it yourself?)
- Some in your party, including a Senate Democratic leader, say the country should go over the cliff if Republicans don’t relent on taxes. Can you say right now the cliff will not be breached? (If you get the supposed revenue increase from the tax increase, will you actually use it for debt reduction, or simply spend the revenue?)
- Why was the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi so lightly guarded, despite complaints about deteriorating security conditions in Libya? (why were rescue teams and military assets never deployed to rescue American citizens?)
- So, about those new pot laws. Does the federal government plan to intervene in Washington and Colorado, which both voted to legalize marijuana last week? (that’s actually a very interesting question in itself. Would love to hear the answer)
- You said during the last presidential debate with Mitt Romney that the defense sequester “will not happen.†Was that a misstatement or are you really that confident? (were you pandering, or just clueless?)
I suspect that the majority of the questions will revolve around Petraeus affair during the PC, with lots of deflections from Obama (along with lots of ums, ers, and ahs).
What questions would you ask?
