The One To Get a New Teleprompter So He Won't Look Silly In Front of the Press

Can you imagine the reaction had President Bush done something like this?

One wouldn’t know it from reading the Washington Post or New York Times, but some inside the White House don’t think that President Barack Obama hit a home run with his first national press conference last week.

“It looked scripted beyond the scripted part, the speech,” says one former communications adviser, who has been feeding notes and suggestions to the White House team and worked with them on the inauguration. “Every president has gone into one of these things knowing that there were some pre-arranged questions or journalists to be called on, but this one was pretty ham-handed.”

To that end, he says, the White House is looking to install a small video or computer screen into the podium used by the president for press conferences and events in the White House. “It would make it easier for the comms guys to pass along information without being obvious about it,” says the adviser.

The screen would indicate whom to call on, seat placement for journalists, pass along notes or points to hit, and so forth, says the adviser.

Obama gives a great speech on a prompter, but off-the-cuff he's a stuttering mess. His first press conference was pretty rough and his handlers can't afford to have him look like that again.