Obama's second big press conference barely touched on foreign policy or national security, writes DENIS STAUNTON.
US TELEVISION viewers have to work hard these days to avoid seeing their president, who joked with Jay Leno on the Tonight Showlast week and laughed so much on CBS's 60 Minuteson Sunday that the interviewer asked whether he was punch-drunk.
It was a much more sober Barack Obama who appeared for an hour during prime time on all the US networks on Tuesday night, giving his second press conference since taking office two months ago.
Obama was unsmiling almost throughout, as he gave long, detailed answers to questions posed by reporters from television, news agencies and the speciality media, but from no major newspapers. The closest the president came to showing emotion was when CNN’s Ed Henry pressed him on why he had taken so long to express anger about massive bonuses paid to AIG staff after the insurance giant received a federal bailout.
“It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak, you know?” Obama snapped.
The contrast with former president George W Bush’s press conferences could not have been more stark, as questions on Tuesday focused almost exclusively on domestic issues, with scarcely a mention of foreign policy or national security.
The US has sent an extra 17,000 troops to Afghanistan and the administration is about to publish a major review of its policy there, but Obama made no mention of the war in his opening statement, and nobody asked him about it.
Instead, the president used his prime-time hour to reassure the US public that the recession would give way to economic recovery, but that a return to prosperity would take patience and careful planning.
He warned that renewed prosperity must be based on a modified economic model that would spread rewards more widely, and in which financial services had a more modest role.
“When you have an economy in which the majority of growth is coming from the financial sector, when AIG selling a derivative is counted as an increase in the gross domestic product, then that’s not a model for sustainable economic growth,” he said.
“And what we have to do is invest in those things that will allow the American people’s capacity for ingenuity and innovation, their ability to take risks but make sure that those risks are grounded in good products and good services that they believe they can market to the rest of the country, that those models of economic growth are what we’re promoting.”
Obama is seeking to appeal to voters over the heads of legislators as he makes the case for a $3.6 trillion (€2.65 trillion) budget plan that Congress is already picking apart.
Republicans are determined to oppose what they say is profligate spending, and the president faces opposition from conservative Democrats in the Senate.
He indicated a willingness to compromise on Tuesday, dodging a question about whether he would veto a budget Bill that does not include a middle-class tax cut or a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions.
“We never expected when we printed out our budget that they would simply Xerox it and vote on it. We assume that it has to go through the legislative process,” he said.