Looking back through my blog posts on candidate Obama, I find that I was on the cutting edge of TelePrompter criticism. On July 24 of last year, in what may be the first blog post that ever pointed out the man’s reliance on the device, I commented on his Berlin speech:
If you want to make eye contact with Barack Obama don’t stand in the center of the audience. Because he’s so dependent on the TelePrompters, he never, and I mean never, looks straight ahead.
This is why you rarely see a photo of Obama looking straight ahead while giving a speech. He can’t put two words together without saying “uhhh” unless he relies on a scrolling text on glass. In a cobra-like rhythm he would look first to one side, chin tilted up in an imperious manner, say a few words, and then move his head to the other side to say a few more words, cleverly disguising the real reason for his head moves as an attempt to make eye contact with his audience.
But if you watched his press conference last night you may have seen something new. He actually looked straight ahead while speaking. And how was this accomplished? Did he suddenly learn to memorize his prepared text? Nope. He had a new, large-screen TV in the back of the room, out of the view of the TV audience, that scrolled the text in front of him instead of at an angle. There are even photos in the media this morning of the president looking straight ahead.
Obviously, the national joke that Obama’s TelePrompter has become is eating at the POTUS. Question: Does the White House really think this ruse will go unnoticed by the American people?
UPDATE: AP’s Ron Fournier, in a “news analysis” after last night’s press conference, runs interference with abandon for the president:
What kind of politician brings a teleprompter to a news conference?
A careful one.
President Barack Obama took no chances in his second prime-time news conference, reading a prepared statement in which he took both sides of the AIG bonus brouhaha and asked an anxious nation for its patience.
This would have been “analyzed” as proof of stupidity during the George W. Bush administration. Give credit, though, to Fournier for at least mentioning the new TelePrompter ploy:
It was a carefully modulated statement, and Obama — relying on a familiar crutch — read it off a flat-screen monitor perched at the back of the East Room.
UPDATE: Video added: