Mar

Journalists Turn Up Heat on Obama

Posted by: Mike's America @ 7:54 am in Barack Obama

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As Harry Truman famously said: “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen?” Obama has started running from the kitchen when the news media turns up the heat.

Ask Tough Questions? Yes, They Can!
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
March 4, 2008

SAN ANTONIO It took many months and the mockery of “Saturday Night Live” to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl.

The day before primaries in Ohio and Texas that could effectively seal the Democratic presidential nomination for him, a smiling Obama strode out to a news conference at a veterans facility here. But the grin was quickly replaced by the surprised look of a man bitten by his own dog.

Reporters from the Associated Press and Reuters went after him for his false denial that a campaign aide had held a secret meeting with Canadian officials over Obama’s trade policy. A trio of Chicago reporters pummeled him with questions about the corruption trial this week of a friend and supporter. The New York Post piled on with a question about him losing the Jewish vote.

Obama responded with the classic phrases of a politician in trouble. “That was the information that I had at the time. . . . Those charges are completely unrelated to me. . . . I have said that that was a mistake. . . . The fact pattern remains unchanged.”

When those failed, Obama tried another approach. “We’re running late,” the candidate said, and then he disappeared behind a curtain.

Before he beat his hasty retreat, however, Obama found time to assign blame for the tough questions suddenly coming his way. “The Clinton campaign has been true to its word in employing a ‘kitchen sink’ strategy,” he protested. “There are, what, three or four things a day?”

Spoken like a man who had just been hit on the head with a heavy piece of porcelain.

Another big rookie mistake is to cut short a press conference and run from the room. It only amplifies the importance of the questions and Obama’s lame response.

The sharks are in the water and they smell blood! It’s about time.

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7 comments so far

wesmorgan1

Yep, he’s going to have to learn how to deal with this stuff, because it isn’t going to stop. I will say that the questions about “losing the Jewish vote” were pretty lame, but he will have to answer for Rezko. I’m still not so sure about the Canadian thing; what the Canadian wrote may not necessarily reflect what was actually said. Anyone here remember “fitting the intelligence around the policy” from the Downing Street memos?

March 4th, 2008 at 10:19 am

MariesTwoCents

Oh Obama think’s has has it rough now, wait till McCain and the Republican Attack Machine get going.

He wont know what hit him

March 4th, 2008 at 11:32 am

Gregory Dittman

Geometric logic and strawberrys are not far behind. He might not have stress balls, but he does have plenty of cigarettes (he’s a chain smoker after all) to calm himself down.

This is the same guy that wants to stress prevention in his healthcare plan. Maybe somebody should question Barack on that.

March 4th, 2008 at 2:16 pm

Igor R.

You can only pretend that a two-faced Marxist cult leader is the Messiah for so long. The king is looking decidedly under-dressed these days.

March 4th, 2008 at 4:01 pm

SoCal Chris

I am looking forward to seeing how Mr. Obama responds to being under the spotlight with more scrutiny. Below is a good article that was written today by Byron York at National Review Online about the NAFTA controversy and is entitled:

“Is Obama Lying About NAFTAGate?
He certainly doesn’t seem to be telling the whole truth.”

Please read through the entire article…it’s good:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWNjOGQ1MDI4NjViMWQwMGM0MmZkMzNkMzY2NTU2NjY=

March 4th, 2008 at 5:51 pm

Mike's America

Great article SoCal Chris. I excerpted this:

The campaign, and the Canadian government, initially denied everything. “The Canadian ambassador issued a statement saying that the story was absolutely false,” top Obama adviser Susan Rice said Thursday night on MSNBC. “There had been no such contact. There had been no discussions on NAFTA.” Obama himself, asked about the story the next day, said, “It did not happen.”

But it turned out that there had been contact, and something did indeed happen. Later news reports identified the Obama adviser as Austan Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who serves as a senior adviser to the Obama campaign. Those reports said Goolsbee met with officials at the Canadian consulate in Chicago, where the NAFTA discussion allegedly took place.
…
News of the memo changed the whole story, and the Clinton campaign quickly sought to take advantage of it. “At this point what we have is a lot of statements from the Obama campaign that have been proven to be demonstrably false,” Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton’s chief spokesman, told reporters Monday. “There is a memo surfacing and circulating in the Canadian government that makes clear that the Obama campaign communicated one thing to the people of Ohio about NAFTA and another thing to the Canadian government about NAFTA.”

Wolfson challenged the Obama campaign to own up to the fact that a conversation had indeed occurred. But when top Obama aide David Plouffe spoke to reporters on a conference call a couple of hours later, he wouldn’t concede anything. “This conversation has been discredited by the Canadian government, it has been discredited by our campaign,” Plouffe said. “It is simply a conversation that did not happen.”
…
What is going on? With the evidence we have so far, Obama appears to be in a difficult position. At first, his campaign denied that there was any contact with the Canadian government. Then, when it was forced to concede that there had been contact, it insisted that it had nothing to do with softening Obama’s position on NAFTA. And then, when the newly-released memo suggested that it had been about just that, Team Obama simply stuck with its story.

Obama and his campaign are clearly LYING.

March 4th, 2008 at 7:09 pm