Entries tagged with “Chuck Todd” from Reality Window

In many ways, I think the first 100 days summation is a false marker of sorts. The world goes at its own pace and things like pandemics don't really care who is President of the United States. But given that the US (and foreign) media are fascinated with the arbitrary assessment point and have produced lots of verbiage and pictures for us to review, here's some of the things that made an impression on me.

The president held a prime-time press conference (transcript via NYT) which was distinguished by a couple of things. First, how nice to have a president who can speak intelligently and articulately on a broad range of issues. David Gergen on CNN almost embarrassed himself exclaiming over this point. The second was the improvement in the quality of the questions this time around. Here's the video of the complete press conference in case you missed it.

Chuck Todd no longer needs to hang his head in shame. He redeemed himself with his question on Pakistan. Actually it wasn't that the question was so outstanding other than raising the topic itself of Pakistan's stability vs. its nuclear arsenal. What was notable was the response it elicited from Obama about US connections with the Pakistan military and the fragility of the civilian government. It almost makes one wonder if there aren't scenarios drawn up somewhere that encourage the Pakistani military to step back in and take control of the government in a military coup if the Taliban threat proves too much for President Zardari and his government.

But the two best questions came from Michael Scherer and Jake Tapper with an assist from Mark Knoller of CBS.

Jake tackled the question of torture, specifically asking if Obama thought that the Bush administration sanctioned torture. Obama never said yes, directly but he did talk at length about the fact that waterboarding was torture and that he had put a stop to such "enhanced interrogation techniques". He brought up a story of Winston Churchill and his response to suggestions of torture for German detainees during WWII. Not one I'd heard before but it's an outstanding response for those among us still debating in their minds about whether or not torture is ever the right response. Here's part of Obama's response to Jake's question.

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, "We don't torture," when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

There's more plus the video clip on Jake's blog. See the NYT transcript for Knoller's follow-up which did shed more light.

Michael Scherer asked Obama about his stance on the State Secrets act and whether he was going to continue as the Bush administration had. This is an area which has been very unclear as to where the Obama administration stands. Obama took the opportunity to clear the air on it, noting that it was overly broad in its current implementation. From Scherer's post about the exchange:

He said there should be "ways to redact, to carve out certain cases, to see what can be done so that a judge in chambers can review information without it being in open court, you know, there should be some additional tools so that it's not such a blunt instrument." This is, in rough terms, the idea behind the State Secrets Protection Act, a bill that has been introduced in the Senate by Feingold and other Democrats. Though Obama has not yet said whether or not he would support that bill, he clearly indicated Wednesday that he is ready to work on negotiating a new standard with civil libertarians.

All in all an interesting way to spend an hour. And just for the record, this is Obama's third prime-time press conference of his presidency on day 100. Per Tim Fernholz at The American Prospect, "...his predecessors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush each had only four in the entire eight years of their respective presidencies." Though as Ben Smith, in a post about Clinton's lack of prime-time pressers deriving from the refusal of the networks to carry them, noted this "Obama's ability to command the television time -- though the networks will, no doubt, quickly tire of losing revenues -- speaks both to his star power and the depth of the current sense of crisis."

Well, let's hope that the sense of crisis lessens to the point that prime-time presidential press conferences are once more considered too boring for prime-time. And on that note, the White House media people have posted a presidential photostream on flickr with a Creative Commons attribution license. Enjoy:

From Chuck Todd of MSNBC: