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Live Blogging the State of the Union Address

Fine. I don’t mind doing this as long as I get some participation! So join in!

I’m pouring the scotch now.

So, I previewed this a bit earlier today. The one point I want to reiterate is that the substance of SOTU speeches varies according to when in the administration’s lifecyle it is given. Since this is an election year, this is less about governing and more about campaigning. So expect a bit more credit-claiming, a bit more laying down of legislative markers, and a bit more effort to spell out the differences between Republicans and Democrats.

A couple of interesting human interest stories as sidebars. Gabby Giffords, of course, is one. The missing Mark Kirk is another. Giffords, by the way, got a huge welcome when she entered the chamber.

One thing to ignore is the incessant chatter from commentators regarding “What the President Must Accomplish Tonight”. He’s actually not going to accomplish much. As I noted earlier, it’s not likely that he’s going to get any positive approval bump from this speech. It won’t help him get legislation through. Think of it really as a very widely-watched campaign address. (He should get an audience of roughly 40-45 million.) Most of the audience will be favorably disposed toward him (they self-select).

And here’s the man of the hour!

There is a real strategy for getting positioned properly to actually greet the President as he enters. Some people are incredibly good at it – they even get autographs.

There’s a nice moment. If that hug with Gabby doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you are a Borg.

(BTW, what was that all about when Obama told SecDef Panetta that he did a “great job”?) [EDIT: It appears, by light of day, to be a successful rescue mission in Somalia].

Some of the best theater in these speeches is watching the byplay between the VP and the Speaker. Tip O’Neil used to mock George H. W. Bush mercilessly during Reagan’s talk. Reagan would list a legislative request, and O’Neill would whisper “Not going to happen George…”

Didn’t take him long to mention Bin Laden! Good move. The Armed Services are a bipartisan symbol. You can’t go wrong starting with praise for them.

Is it me, or does he seem really energized tonight? Man on a mission. I generally think he doesn’t do passion well – let’s see how it comes off tonight. He’s certainly putting the “ooomph” into it.

Ah, here’s the campaign pitch – fairness. Big theme tonight. Everybody plays by the same set of rules. The reprise of the “we are Americans” made famous in his earlier speech is expected.

Second campaign tactic – remind the audience of how bad things were before he took office. 8 million jobs lost or on the brink. In the last 22 months…… (note there’s a gap there in the chronology, but never mind…..)

This is really a campaign speech, and he gets the partisans on their feat with a pledge to fight obstructionism.

And then lead with a success story – the automakers’ recovery. It’s a good example to use. Note, by the way, where the cities he just cited are located – Ohio! Perhaps the most crucial battleground state. Every word, every example, every nuance of this speech is chosen with an eye for electoral impact.

(What happened to Kerry? Fell off the windsurfer?)

Again, everyone is in favor of keeping jobs here, but one might argue that creating tax incentives in this fashion is in fact unfair. But again, it is good politics. Notice, however, that is in tension with the second part of his speech – he won’t stand by when other nation’s don’t play by the rules. But if you are creating tax incentives to keep companies here, is that a form of protectionism? You tell me.

Another commission? Modeled after Bowles-Simpson?

Here’s the first human interest story. Reagan began this practice of putting a face on a story, if I’m not mistaken, by inviting guests to the gallery and then referencing them. Jackie looks nervous. (I forgot to give the over/under on standing applause lines. Anyone keeping track?)

I hope my students are thinking of me when he talks about teachers working tirelessly, with modest pay. Substitute professors for teachers. We matter!

This is actually a gutsy call on his part, because his push for merit pay (which he didn’t actually call it) is strongly opposed by teachers’ unions. But it plays well with the middle class.

Can he make students stay in school? Isn’t that locally controlled?

(I wish I was sitting behind Al Franken and Bernie Sanders – can you imagine that conversation?)

Another gutsy rhetorical flourish here on immigration – he has not endeared himself to the Latino community with his stepped up enforcement of immigration laws.

(What’s in Joe’s glass? It’s a clear liquid.)

Boehner is mouthing “keystone, keystone”….this call for an all out energy policy to reduce dependence on foreign oil has been voiced by every president since Nixon.

@Chris – You are right. He’s mixing in enough initiatives here – drilling off-shore, energy production, etc. – designed to appeal to independents. Hard to square with keystone however….

What is clean energy, by the way? Is there such an animal?

Geithner seems puzzled by the mortgage program. But then, he always looks quizzical.

Fewer regulations – another shout out to independents. You hit the nail on the head Chris – he’s working really hard here. Wow, he finally gets the Republicans out of their seats!

Ah, finally – he gets to the health mandate, and that brings out the first boos of the night (at least I think they are boos).

How is this playing out there? He seems heavy on rhetoric, heavy on promises, but I’m just not sure he’s going to get much bang for the buck here. Lots of vilifying the usual suspects.

Cordray gets boos too.

Has Boehner reacted to anything tonight?

I was waiting for the Buffett reference. I think tax reform is one area in which the two parties can do business. But not if he stakes out a fixed rate – that’s not how to negotiate.

As I look at the chamber, they all seem resigned that nothing will happen – that almost none of these proposals is going anywhere. The chamber seems lifeless, as if they are going through the applause motions. It’s almost as if Obama has lost them. But then, this speech isn’t directed at them – it’s to the broader audience. I’m getting a sense that members of Congress feel they are being made scapegoats, and they don’t like it – they are set pieces, props, in his opening campaign speech. Not a pleasant position to be in.

So, has this been an effective campaign speech? What do you think?

Looks like he’s going to pivot to foreign policy here. (Don’t forget Syria!) Hillary doesn’t seem confident about Syria.

There’s the olive branch to the Jewish vote. ….

This is heavy – very heavy – on the symbolic language. This is an old-fashioned stump speech. It’s going to play incredibly well with his supporters, it will get yawns from Republicans and I think independents will be skeptical.

Boy, he is hitting every button tonight. Can he wrap himself any tighter in his commander-in-chief mantle? This is great politics. Finishing with Bin Laden – a great touch. Look at Biden – he’s sold.

Now bring it on home….

Great finish – wonderful rhetoric, soaring symbolism, ending on perhaps the high note of his presidency……killing Bin Laden.

Here’s the issue: is there a core to this speech? If I’m a voter, what is the theme here? I wonder if that got lost in the effort to hit so many rhetorical high notes.

I thought Chris touched on a key point – this was targeting that sweet spot: an appeal to the independents, particularly those in key battleground states.He really tried to sprinkle in a mix of initiatives that both emphasized what government can do and what it can’t do. Much of it was designed to show that government can be a partner with business, rather than usurping the private sector. He did this on a variety of issues – education reform, energy exploration and research, reorganization of government, tax reform. These are all, in theory, policies that can appeal to moderates.

He stayed away from some hot button issues – no mention of entitlement reform, for instance. Not a whole lot here on deficit reduction. These are two issues that can’t be resolved before 2012, so there’s really no incentive to address them.

THE REPUBLICAN RESPONSE

Poor Mitch Daniel. He’s been proposed as a potential Republican presidential candidate, with some party establishment members even suggesting he should step in during the current cycle to rescue the party. That’s not going to happen. His appeal, however, comes from his budget expertise and moderate credentials – not his speechifying. It’s always hard to go from the pageantry of a State of the Union speech in Congress to a low-key rebuttal in some lobby area. Bobby Jindal has never recovered from his SOTU response a few years back.

If you listen to Daniels, he has laid out some potential areas of bipartisan agreement, but you have to listen closely. One is clearly tax reform.

Jeff – this is a hundred times better than Jindal. Poor Bobbie looked like he was giving his speech while taking out the trash at his house. It was a disaster. This one is actually pretty good, if you stay awake. He even has a light bulb joke! Plus, I’m guessing it will be short. That was one weakness of Obama’s speech – it was Clintonian in length. That’s been an unfortunate trend in the SOTUs recently.

And he finishes with the old Reagan “City On A Hill” allusion. I thought this was actually a very good speech but delivered in his midwestern understated way. Did he impress any of you as presidential timber? Did he spark a draft Daniels movement?

Summary: Look, these SOTU speeches are always overhyped. They can’t possible live up to the drama imposed on the event by the punditocracy, one reinforced by the pageantry and the continuity of a tradition dating back in some form to the first president. In that sense, they are doomed to disappoint. But if you lower your expectations, and instead view the speech as it really is – a campaign speech that benefits by having a built-in audience, then you can begin to assess it on its merits. On those terms, I thought this was partly effective. I thought Obama’s decision to begin and end with reference to the military mission that culminated in Bin Laden’s death was a brilliant choice – and one that reminds us how much the office changes the man. If you simply read those words, they sounded positively Bush-like – a Mission Accomplished moment where the mission really was accomplished. By wrapping himself in the flag, and in his duties as commander in chief, Obama was able to rise above partisanship – at least in that portion of the speech. I thought that was perhaps the best aspect of his address.

The second element that I thought worked was his willingness to reach out to independents in a number of issue areas – educational reform, government reorganization, offshore drilling and especially tax reform with an eye toward fairness, that many middle-class independents would embrace. As Chris noted, this was both politically strategic, but also laid down some potential points of agreement with Republicans that possibly could serve as legislative starting points in a second term.

The weakness, I thought, is that Obama tried to do too much, and as a result his olive branch to independents was in danger of getting lost in the rhetoric that both demonized Congress and sought to portray himself as somehow above politics. When he launched into strident attacks on the usual bogeymen – oil companies, rich people, Wall St. – he may have appealed to his base, but he also undercut his attempt to reach out to the moderate middle. And the speech was too long – if he cut it in half, it would have been twice as effective.

In the end, I think this speech illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the Obama presidency. He is able, at times, to capture an audience with some very moving language. But too often he loses his voice in an effort to craft a poll-driven speech that on paper tries to split the difference between competing philosophies, but in practice rings hollow because there’s no underlying theme, or core set of principles that ties everything together. I thought tonight he might hang everything on the issue of fairness, but it didn’t quite cohere. And that is the enduring issue with this guy, I think – what is he about? In the end, this was a speech crafted primarily with an eye toward helping him win reelection. And it reflected the strengths, and the weakness, of that strategic objective. He tried to appeal to both his base and to independents. My guess is that the base will be happier than will the independents – if so, the speech missed the mark, because it is the independents that he must win back if he is to win reelection.

Great participation tonight. I’m glad I caved and decided to live blog the speech – it was much more interesting with everyone else involved.

I’ll be on tomorrow with some follow up comments.

Thanks again to everyone….

What To Look For Tonight In New Hampshire

Polls close in the remaining New Hampshire towns within an hour, at which point we will begin seeing results begin coming in. Here’s how to interpret the results by location. Romney, as you might expect, must do well in the southern tier counties – particularly Rockingham and Hillsborough. If he gets over 40% in these counties, he will have a good night. In terms of towns, this means doing well in Derry, Bedford and Salem.

Ron Paul, meanwhile, will hope to draw well along the Connecticut River towns on the western mid-part of the state, such as Lebanon and Hanover, where there’s lots of college students and a strong Democratic presence. Huntsman, however, will be competing for some of these college students as well as with voters in Romney’s strongholds. Generally speaking, he wants to reprise the McCain coalition from 2008. That means doing well in Hanover, Concord, and Keene.

Gingrich spent a lot of time focusing on the more rural areas, particularly in northern New Hampshire (Coos County). These areas don’t have a lot of voters, but he’s hoping to piece together a strong turnout based on many smaller vote totals. Santorum will be competing for some of these voters, but he also wants to draw heavily in highly populated blue-collar areas down south like Manchester, Merrimack and Rochester, which have a strong Catholic vote and Tea party support.

If there’s one bellwether town in New Hampshire, let it be Nashua – it has a relatively diverse population.

So, how is the vote likely to go? As always, I’m relying not on any sophisticated voting model. Instead, as I did with Iowa, I’m going to rely on the most recent polling data. This time, however, I’m going to correct the mistake I made in Iowa by ignoring late trends. In New Hampshire, recent polls suggest both Huntsman and, to a lesser extent, Gingrich, are trending up. So…..drum roll please… here’s what we should see when the dust clears:

Romney 35%

Huntsman 18.5%

Paul 18%

Gingrich 13%

Santorum 11%

Remember, I’m a professional. You shouldn’t do this at home. No wagering please.

I’ll be back on in about 15 minutes for live blogging. Please join!

On A Wing and a Prayer: What Tim Tebow Can Teach Obama

When it comes to leadership, what can President Obama learn from Broncos’ quarterback Tim Tebow? Apparently, quite a lot. At least that’s the claim Matthew Dowd makes in this recent National Journal article. Dowd argues that Obama has lost his leadership mojo: “Take a look at Obama’s latest interview. It does not make you feel better about where we are heading. You don’t feel like we are going to win under his leadership. He points fingers and refuses to admit his own mistakes or weaknesses. I often wonder where is the Barack Obama of the 2007 and 2008 campaign. That Obama was much more like the leader we need at this time. He offered hope, he had soaring rhetoric, he offered a change from the bitter politics in Washington, and he made us feel we could win.”

The cure for Obama’s leadership ills, Dowd argues, is to steal a page from the Tebow playbook and begin “quarterbacking our country” in “Tebow style”. And what is that style? “Tebow is the kind of leader for his football team that our country needs at this crucial moment … . [N]o matter the outcome, Tebow has shown what faith, and confidence and humility can do for a team of limited skills that was losing consistently before. This is exactly what President Franklin Roosevelt and President Reagan understood about leadership…What citizens and businesses need is a leader who can raise us all up to a level we didn’t know we had in us, give us confidence in ourselves, give us a common goal to work toward, and make us believe in and have faith in ourselves again.”

I confess that my first time through I thought this might be one of the most inane columns I have ever read. Upon second reading, however, I was convinced of it. Now, having calmed down a bit, I realize my first and second impressions were exactly right.

Look, as someone who writes what has become essentially a daily blog post, I’m sympathetic to Dowd’s likely motivations in writing this piece. He realized that Tebow is now a national story, and he was probably looking for column material that would attract the maximum google hits. So, we probably shouldn’t take this too seriously. In that vein, let’s play along with Dowd’s logic and see whether Obama has anything to learn from Tebow. To anticipate my conclusion, the short answer is: No. Here’s why.

Let’s begin with the most important point: Tebow doesn’t call his own plays! That’s right – Tebow is miked up and receives direction from the sidelines (and, perhaps, from up above as well – but that’s another story.) It’s possible, I suppose, to do the same with Obama – but who would be calling the shots? Biden? Michelle? If we follow the Tebow football metaphor, why not Bill Belichick? Of course, had Belichick been in charge since day 1 of Obama’s presidency it’s likely that unemployment would be at 4%, Democrats would still control Congress and Obama’s approval would be close 75%. And all with a cabinet composed of political retreads and unknowns.

Still I suppose it’s not too late to bring Belichick on board now. Of course, his first move would probably be to sit Obama. I can hear the press conference now:

Question: “Coach Belichick, why is the President on the inactive list for this week’s game?”

Coach Hoodie: “Coach’s decision for the good of the team. Clinton gives us a better chance to win, so I made the switch. The President’s record being what it is, I just thought it was best to make the switch now. That’s it.” Clinton, of course, would then lead the Democrats to an improbable comeback in 2012, when they reclaim Congress and she gets 8 years. Obama would become a regular on the Rachel Maddow show.

Reason two: Tebow is getting bailed out by his field goal kicker. Who’s going to hit one from beyond 50 yards with time running down for Obama? Hillary? Personally, I prefer Kathy Ireland, but that’s purely for aesthetic purposes. Hillary probably has better distance.

But I digress. My point, I hope is clear. Dowd would have us believe that Obama’ s struggles have something to do with defects in his leadership style. In Dowd’s words: “I do think this Tebow boomlet is about faith. And it’s about confidence. And leadership. And humility — a humbleness born of strength and conviction. It is about Tebow’s faith in his own teammates. It is about his faith and confidence in his own organization. It is about him acknowledging his own weaknesses and failings and mistakes and understanding that if his team looks good, then he looks good… This economy, and our country, do not need more programs out of Washington, D.C., or legislation from Congress, or tax cuts for the wealthy, or more spending on government stimulus. What citizens and businesses need is a leader who can raise us all up to a level we didn’t know we had in us, give us confidence in ourselves, give us a common goal to work toward, and make us believe in and have faith in ourselves again.

It seems this is a leadership lesson we keep having to learn over and over again through our country’s history. It is so easy to forget how successes were achieved along the way by Kennedy-style exhortations such as ‘we are going to the moon.’ It is so easy to default into failing Washington-style, us-against-them, to try and get short-term political success. But maybe a quarterback who seems as much boy as man can show us all, including the candidates for president, how to win and how to get our country back on track.”

Oh, please. Obama’s “failings” to date have nothing to do with a faulty leadership style, and everything to do with a sluggish economy that has failed to create jobs – a failure rooted in a fiscal meltdown that predated his time as the nation’s “quarterback”. And while Obama’s “quarterback play” hasn’t been faultless (see my previous post) the fact remains that he is playing the game under rules set down more than two centuries ago that limit his play calling, and facing a cohesive opposition party that controls half the playing field. It’s going to take more than a wing and a prayer to win this one. Indeed, the whole “us vs. them” football metaphor is misleading. The truth is that in the last week alone Congress has passed both a major appropriations bill and a military authorization bill, and in both cases the legislation had enough bipartisan support to overcome opposition from the extremist wings of both parties. The lesson, I think, is clear: bargaining and compromise, and not Kennedy-style exhortations, are what constitutes real leadership in this political system. Or, to use the football metaphor, Obama should skip the fourth-quarter dramatics and inspirational speeches and instead pursue a strategy of “three yards and a cloud of fuss.” It is amazing how inspirational success – even minor success – can be.

As for Tebow Time – today, he confronts the Devil himself. Let’s see how that turns out.

Why Did Political Scientists Miss the Midterm Wave?

After a period of post-midterm decompression, it’s time to return to the blogging salt mines. Picking up where I left off in my last post, let me start with a simple question: why did every political science forecast of the midterm election of which I am aware underestimate the size of the Republican wave that hit the House (the few that predicted Senate results were off as well)? To be sure, the results did fall within the confidence interval of some of the models, and most political scientists foresaw the Republican House takeover, but none of the predicted point estimates came very close to the final results. As of today, it looks like Republicans picked up about 62 House seats (four races are still pending) and 6 Senate seats. To refresh your memory, here’s John Sides’ chart with the Labor Day political science projections.

So, the most pessimistic forecast from the Democrats’ perspective – Campbell’s – still had Democrats holding more than 200 seats, or a dozen more than the actual 190 they now possess (with four races pending). Note that even with the advantage of several additional weeks of data, I didn’t fare much better; my “tweaking” of the projection models led me to forecast a 49-seat Republican pickup, considerably short of their actual gain.

In addition to the thrill of giving out Presidential Power t-shirts (yes, I will announce the contest winners in a separate post), the reason why I am interested in these forecasts is because they are a measure of how well political scientists understand midterm elections. Unlike someone like Nate Silver, we aren’t only interested in getting the final numbers right – instead, we want to understand what explains those results. (By the way, Silver’s prediction – he’s “538” in the chart – as of Labor Day fell, as you can see, in the middle of the pack. That’s not too shabby – for an economist!)

What most interests me about this last midterm is not that the forecast models were off – it’s that they were all off in the same direction. Political scientists systematically underestimated the Republican seat gain. In one respect, of course, this is perhaps not surprising; as I noted in several of my pre-election posts, political scientists are inherently conservative folk. They tend to assume that future iterations of an event will unfold much as it did previously, so prior patterns should be a reasonably reliable predictor of what’s to come. Evidently, this assumption did not hold true for this latest midterm. But why not? I can think of four related answers: the unprecedented depth of the economic recession, the nationalization of midterm elections, the role of the Tea Party and the collective impact of the controversial legislation – particularly TARP, the stimulus bill and health insurance – passed by the Democratically-controlled Congress during the last four years. Let me start by exploring a couple of these factors: the economy and the nationalization of elections. I’ll deal with the Tea Party and the controversial votes issues in a separate post.

As I’ve explained in previous posts, most forecast models incorporate some measure of the economy, such as quarterly growth in GDP or disposable income, or changes in the unemployment rate. As my colleague Bert Johnson surmised during our election night coverage, it is possible that forecast models constructed from previous years’ economic data may have underestimated the relative importance of the current economic downturn to voters. In other words, models based on “normal” economic conditions may not do particularly well when the economy is an historical outlier, as this one certainly is. Consider that during the last six decades, as this charts shows, monthly unemployment levels have only approached the current rate once before, during Reagan’s first term.

During the 1982 midterm, of course, Reagan’s Republican Party only controlled the Senate, not the House; the divided government may have prevented voters from holding Reagan and the Republicans solely accountable for the dismal economy in that election which may partly explain why Republicans only lost 26 House seats. (Note that they also had fewer House seats to lose.) In 2010, by contrast, Democrats controlled all three branches and thus were more likely to suffer retribution from voters concerned about persistently high unemployment.

Of course, unemployment is only one facet of how voters’ assess the economy, and the economy is not all they assess during midterms. Nonetheless, it is an important component – perhaps the most important component that goes into a voter’s calculus. Now add to the mix concern over record post-war budget deficits, spending on TARP and the stimulus, uncertainly about health care costs and you have the setting for a midterm election driven to a much greater degree than in previous years by economic worries. Moreover, as I’ve noted in previous posts and as this table shows, House elections have become increasingly nationalized since the mid-1980’s.

This means individual House races are more likely to be influenced by factors outside each district – factors less amenable to individual candidate’s control. I’m currently putting together the numbers for the 2010 midterm, but I have no reason to believe it was any less nationalized than recent midterms. That means the impact of economic factors was likely even greater during this last election cycle.

My point is not that the forecast models totally ignored economic factors – it’s that economic factors weighed more heavily in midterm voters’ minds this time around than is typically the case. With Democrats viewed as the party in charge, and with Democrats holding more vulnerable seats, they were extremely susceptible to getting washed out of office in a “wave” election. To capitalize on these conditions, Republicans needed to both run good candidates and to get voters to show up at the polls. As it happened, the Tea Party stepped in to assist with both conditions. I’ll address that topic in the next post.

Addendum: The initial post showed the wrong unemployment data – I’ve corrected it above.

Stop the Presses! Obama to Hold Live Press Conference in One Hour!

President Obama is scheduled to hold a news conference today beginning at 12:45 p.m. – about an hour from now. By my count, it will be his first full-fledged conference since July 22, 2009 – just over 10 months – when he infamously said that officers from the Cambridge Police Department acted “stupidly” when they arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his own home. Obama later backed off from that statement, and subsequently held the famous ‘beer summit” at the White House with Gates and the arresting officer. But he has never held another formal press conference until today. In the interim, he has carefully managed his interactions with the press by either relying on smaller, less formal interactions, handing exclusives to favored journalists (particularly favoring, according to critics, the New York Times) or bypassing the media directly and speaking directly to the public.

Although I would not have predicted he would go this long between formal press conferences, the fact that he has tried to avoid them should come as no surprise. Even before the ‘Gates-gate”, I had predicted that Obama’s promise of a more “transparent” administration would, in the area of press relations, fall prey to the realities of the modern, televised press conference. That is, Obama would realize what previous presidents invariably learned: from the president’s perspective, the televised press conference serves no useful purpose. In theory, of course, the press conference is an opportunity for the media to hold the president accountable for his actions to date, and for the President to explain those actions. In practice, neither of those objectives tends to be met. Given the constraints under which they operate – reporters must be called on by the president, and they have no time for follow-up questions to probe answers in depth – journalists too often feel pressured to ask The One Question that will elicit a controversial and thus newsworthy response. Presidents, anticipating this, become adept at eating up time with long opening statements and by answering questions with the equivalent of the Senate filibuster, or by “suggesting” questions in advance to favored reporters.

In a previous post discussing the history of presidential press conferences I have suggested a way to reform the press conference so that it addresses the interests of both reporters and presidents – and thus the public. In the meantime, however, Obama’s failure to hold press conferences has led to no little grumbling from the media who accuse him of treating the press with contempt. Several of them, citing my previous post, have castigated Obama for his failure to meet regularly with the press (see, for example, here and here.) Most recently, Chuck Todd complained of Obama’s “disdain” for the press.

Rather than disdain, I would argue that Obama is motivated by the same feelings that led previous presidents to shy away from formal press conferences: political self-interest. If so, what has prompted Obama to finally hold another press conference today? Two words: Oil Spill. As I’ve discussed in my last two posts, the growing public backlash, spearheaded by officials from both parties, to the allegedly slow response by the federal government to the spill is threatening to have Katrina-like implications for Obama’s presidency. Obama has evidently calculated that the risk of losing control of the oil spill narrative (see here and here and here) outweighs the risks inherent in holding a press conference. Look for him to start the conference off with a lengthy statement detailing everything the government has done, and will do – such as tightening regulations governing drilling, extending a moratorium on off-shore drilling and making organizational changes to the agency responsible for issuing drilling permits – before taking questions. He will likely stress two themes in his answers: it’s BP’s fault, and the government will hold them accountable. Journalists, meanwhile, should try to get him on the record to respond to the charges leveled by Governor Jindal and others about the bureaucratic obstacles that have prevented local and state authorities from placing booms and using dredging to prevent the oil spills from endangering delicate coastal areas. Note as well the tone of the questions – has Obama’s reluctance to meet directly with the press in these types of exchanges turned journalists against him?

My big fear, however, is that journalists will chase the wrong rabbit – that they will spend much of this conference pressing Obama on relatively minor issues, such as the alleged attempt to clear the field for Arlen Specter by offering Joe Sestak a government job. Explaining the intricacies of government organizations, which is at the heart of the government’s slow response to this spill, is an inherently unsexy task and one not easily done in the context of a televised Q&A. And yet the performance of these agencies – the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Interior Department – is of far more consequence to the public interest than is the Sestak issue.

The conference is in an hour. You can watch a live feed at the White House website. I’ll try to follow up with a post-conference post.

P.S. You should be able to watch a live feed of the press conference at the White House link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/live

I’m tempted to live blog this because it may be the last press conference before the midterms!

P.S.S. I think I can get the live feed from the White House here at:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/president-obama-speaks-press-1

so I’ll try to live blog. I realize it’s last moment, but join in if you want.