Further Adventures in TelePrompTerville

I’d thought that the “Obama can’t speak without a TelePrompTer” meme had died down, but Nick Robinson of The Guardian (U.K.) wrote a sexed-up blog post in which he transcribed Obama’s answer to his press conference question, leaving in all the pauses and adding sometimes bawdy notes about what Robinson imagines Obama was thinking at the time.

Don Surber, the West Virginia blogger who’s been one of the most dogged pushers of the TelePrompTer meme, is pushing this one too, and it’s making the rounds. “We elected a Teleprompter Reader as our president,” sniffs Surber. What did Obama get wrong? It’s really not clear. The question was about whether America was to blame for the financial crisis.

Obama’s answer:

I would say that if you look at the sources of this crisis, the United States certainly has some accounting to do with respect to a regulatory system that was inadequate to the massive changes that had taken place in the global financial system. I think what is also true is that here in Great Britain, in continental Europe, around the world, we were seeing the same mismatch between the regulatory regimes that were in place and the highly integrated global capital markets that had emerged.

Yeah, that’s … really confusing. It’s a dodge, and he said “uh” a couple times, but this is losing the point of the TelePrompTer meme. The meme is that Obama makes gaffes when he’s off the TelePrompTer, not that conservatives are too dim to understand him talk policy off the cuff.