The Washington Independent » teleprompter

From Drudge’s Mouth to the Today Show’s Producers

David Weigel — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:13:44 +0000

In the wake of Vice President Biden’s joke, the “Obama can’t talk without a teleprompter” meme has finally crossed over — it was the subject of a four-minute color segment on Monday’s episode of NBC’s “Today,” which featured such scoops as an interview with the conservative author of the Obama teleprompter blog, the revelation that President Obama often says “uh” when he speaks, and the fact that John F. Kennedy gave his inaugural address “on index cards,” instead of with a technology that hadn’t been invented.

The highlight is probably a clip from David Letterman’s show intended to prove that the teleprompter that “late night comics” have noticed this non-story:

Critics are now criticizing his overuse of the teleprompter. [Audience laughs, Letterman throws his hands up.] OK. Maybe he should think about stepping down.

That’s a joke about the coverage, not about the president.

Unprompted Anti-Semitism

Spencer Ackerman — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:52:21 +0000

So an Arkansas state senator calls Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “that Jew,” and in the course of explaining away the remark through a folksy defense of “traditional values” — apparently this gentleman thinks Andy Griffith was an anti-Semite or something — he defends himself by saying, “I don’t use a teleprompter and occasionally I put my foot in my mouth.” Yeah! Because when President Obama doesn’t have a Teleprompter in front of him, he starts talking like David Irving mixed with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad reading from The Turner Diaries. Rahm Emanuel will tell you all about that.

It’s telling how a Republican politician thinks he can get his people to ignore an anti-Semitic remark by dogwhistling something about Obama.

(h/t Kleefeld.)

Further Adventures in TelePrompTerville

David Weigel — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:19:59 +0000

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.