ROBERT GIBBS: Your last prime-time news conference was nine months ago, sir.  Whispering’s started, what with this oil slick and all…

OBAMA: Look, I’ll do one-on-ones with people I respect—Olbermann, Matthews, David Brooks.  Isn’t that enough?

DAVID AXELROD: No, sir.  Time to show the national press some leg.  Fortunately, Bob’s bunnies haven’t tumbled yet to your contempt for them; they still believe you’re just wary.

Totus-school

GIBBS:  And they’re desperate for face time on national TV.  Sir, the entire White House press gang–Major Garrett and Jake Tapper excepted–made an offer today: you consent to do a nighttime newser, they’ll submit questions in advance and pledge not to follow up.  Sweetener: one free “Escape-from-the-Press-Pool” pass to… you know… take in a soccer game.

JOE BIDEN: Axe and the Gibbster are right, Boss.  I know you don’t wanna breathe the same air as those media clowns, so how ‘bout a compromise?  Conduct the first presidential  telepresser from Camp David.

DAVID AXELROD:  Interesting idea, sir.  Correspondents gather in the East Room as usual, but they address questions to your image on a monitor.  A feed from Aspen Lodge shows you sitting in a wing chair by a blazing fire, confident and in command of the answers you’re reading off an unseen TelePrompter.  Excellent visuals.

OBAMA:  All right.  But I want the media at several more levels of remove.  Bob, set up worktables instead of chairs in the East Room.  Before the presser begins, have participants place their laptops on assigned tables, with screens facing my monitor and displaying the reporter’s picture.  They exit and assemble in the briefing room.

RAHM EMANUEL:  I see where you’re going with this, sir.  The news conference starts.  Cameras pan the venue.  Your live image on the giant monitor dwarfs the ghost-in-the-machine faces on the laptops.  You call on a reporter and a camera zooms in on his laptop picture while his disembodied voice asks a question piped in from the press room.  You answer looking like Zeus on Olympus.

aspen

BIDEN:  Man, I dunno.  What journalist with a shred of self-respect would go for that?

GIBBS:  Attention paid to them by the president on national TV trumps self-respect.  Again, only Tapper and Garrett won’t play.

OBAMA:  Those two are getting on my nerves.  When I fly to Oslo next week, throw them off the press plane—after it’s airborne.

GIBBS:  Sir, the news conference.  A good night might be . . . .

OBAMA:  Do it on an NBA off night, Bob.  This is how it’ll go: I’ll open with a twenty minute statement on Bush’s culpability for the massive spill in the Gulf.  Then I’ll take a prescreened question on our improving economy and another on our march toward peace in the Middle East.  I’ll close by bantering a little with Helen Thomas, if she’s still alive.  They’ll eat it up – right Dave?  You used to be a “journalist.”  What do you think?

AXELROD: Your wish is my command, Mr. President.

OBAMA: That’s my boy!