Oh No! This reporter didn’t get the memo. You’re only supposed to ask President Obama soft ball questions. Like, “what is your favorite color or what golf course are you going to tomorrow?
The Politico reports when the even-keeled and cool President Obama gets prickly in public, it never goes unnoticed.
For Obama, who has carefully cultivated a reputation of easily managing confrontations with people who disagree with him, these moments are as rare as they are revealing of the person behind the presidency.
So it’s no surprise that Washington took notice when after a tense interview with a Texas TV reporter on Monday, Obama unclipped his microphone with no smile in sight, and tersely warned, “Let me finish my answers next time we do an interview, all right?”
The president of the United States was not happy. Obama had been corrected (he lost Texas by 12 points, not “a few,” in 2008), he was accused of punishing the state for political reasons (he denied that the White House had any part in the decision not to award a space shuttle to Houston), and he was challenged with the most basic of political questions: Why are you so unpopular in Texas?
And all that in a setting the White House anticipated would be largely free of tricky questions.
The conservative media type Matt Drudge broadcasted word of the interview on his website’s banner spot with the headline “First time: Reporter turns aggressive with Obama,” accompanied by the image of Obama, mid-reprimand.
