Looks like tomorrow night the President will hold a solo press conference on the Administration's actions in the time leading up to the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- his first such appearance since March 6, 2003. Now, I've never been too good at counting months -- at a past job at a non-profit where I worked with a lot with census data, I had a strip of paper running atop my keyboard that read "1 = January, 2 = February..." -- but I took some time to count it out carefully and it seems as if that makes it a full 13 months since the last presidential press conference.
There are certainly ways other than the solo appearance for a president to communicate with the American public -- through his or her spokesperson at press gaggles, in speeches to supporters, by way of senior officials on Sunday programs, and in the occasional State of the Union address -- but this sort of press conference is an eminently knowable forum in which the president stands up and says, as this president did in that March 2003 appearance, "I'm pleased to take your questions tonight, and to discuss with the American people the serious matters facing our country and the world" and both the members of the press corps and the public at large assess the president's inclinations and moods on matters both small and large.
It seems to me that the modern American presidency is an active, full-time, participatory position, one that, in the best of times, is hired for by the American people, and I think it's fair that the responsiveness and at minimum availability of the man or woman holding that position be counted as one measure of job performance. (A quick search reveals that while our two immediate past presidents tended to hold far more solo press conferences, in the face of adversity, our most recent past president was not quite the champ I might have hoped he’d have been. Oh well, no matter.)
There are certainly ways other than the solo appearance for a president to communicate with the American public -- through his or her spokesperson at press gaggles, in speeches to supporters, by way of senior officials on Sunday programs, and in the occasional State of the Union address -- but this sort of press conference is an eminently knowable forum in which the president stands up and says, as this president did in that March 2003 appearance, "I'm pleased to take your questions tonight, and to discuss with the American people the serious matters facing our country and the world" and both the members of the press corps and the public at large assess the president's inclinations and moods on matters both small and large.
It seems to me that the modern American presidency is an active, full-time, participatory position, one that, in the best of times, is hired for by the American people, and I think it's fair that the responsiveness and at minimum availability of the man or woman holding that position be counted as one measure of job performance. (A quick search reveals that while our two immediate past presidents tended to hold far more solo press conferences, in the face of adversity, our most recent past president was not quite the champ I might have hoped he’d have been. Oh well, no matter.)
8:48 PM
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