Another follow-up on the White House press conference question.
As I said before, for the reasons I noted below, I’m sure the Presidential press conferences don’t work from presubmitted questions.
However, as I noted a couple days ago, that doesn’t mean the president’s aides, don’t give him “must-calls” — a list of ringer journalists who they know will toss the president a lifeline with some gimme question.
Bill Sammon of the Washington Times was one of the ‘must-calls’ from last week.
He served up this ridiculous question: “You have been accused of letting the 9-11 threat mature too far, but not letting the Iraq threat mature far enough. First, could you respond to that general criticism?”
For all I know, maybe Sammon gave Scott or Bartlett at look at his question in advance. Who knows? But I really doubt it. After all, they could be pretty confident it would either be something like this or maybe: “Mr. President, many commentators claim John Kerry is a ridiculous liberal who can’t stand up to the bad guys. Can you comment?” You get the idea.
In any case, this strikes me as a separate point. I remain quite sure the journalists from the straight-up publications (real newspapers and TV nets) don’t submit their questions in advance.
