Obama Goes Quiet

Sort of:

After months of what some critics called overexposure, President Obama has of late avoided questions from the White House press corps at large, closing the Oval Office to traditionally informal question-and-answer sessions with reporters and pulling back from the fast pace of news conferences he established when taking office.

The president, whose job-approval ratings have been on a steady slide, hasn't held a formal news conference in 19 weeks, since July 22. That one ended badly, when Mr. Obama waded into a racial controversy by saying a white police officer "acted stupidly" when he arrested a black Harvard professor.

"It can't be a total coincidence that the last time he faced the press corps, we ended with beers in the Rose Garden with Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley, when the focus was supposed to be health care," said Julie Mason, a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner who also covered the Bush administration for the Houston Chronicle.

"It does seem like they are responding to the overexposure argument and trying to exert more control over his appearances," she said.

Veteran White House reporters have been grumbling about the lack of access to the president, who as a candidate vowed an unprecedented level of transparency.

As Jim Geraghty is fond of saying, all of Obama's promises come with an expiration date, and apparently that one expired after Obama suffered foot-in-mouth disease at the July presser.

Of course, this hasn't stopped him from bumping Charlie Brown off the TV schedule with tonight's speech at West Point. Instead of Linus reciting the Christmas story we'll get Obama reciting results of months of dithering.

That's entertainment!

Meanwhile preschoolers will be tuning in to see Charlie Brown and will instead be asking their parents why the Grinch is on instead.