Obama Hopes No One Realizes a Long-Winded Question-Dodge is Still, In Fact, a Dodge

Obama's prime-time health-care press conference tonight only lasted an hour, but it felt longer than a double screening of Gone With the Wind next to a date you're planning on dumping the minute it's over. But Obama rambled on and, like Rhett Butler, just didn't seem to give a damn whether or not anybody else cared.

Of course, the long-winded responses seemed to be part of strategy. According to the American Spectator's Phil Klein, he answered only ten questions during the hour—or, perhaps more accurately, he responded to only ten. Obama seems to have decided ahead of time that when faced with an uncomfortable question, the best idea is to grind away at tangentially related statistics, anecdotes, and talking points until everyone's forgotten what the actual question was anyway. Faced with a number of unpleasant facts about his administration's lack of transparency, for example, Obama did a little dance, sang a song, performed a magic trick, and then said "next question." Well, not really, but the dodging, non-answer he did give was roughly as useful as if he had.

Meanwhile, much of what he did say—particularly about the deficit—was rather suspicious. Over at the Spectator, Phil Klein even goes so far as to call Obama a liar. We'll see tomorrow when the transcripts come out. In the meantime, the truly dedicated can waste bandwidth watching the President's Festival of Dull in stuttering streaming video form here.