User:24dot/Reliance on TelePrompter

Reliance on TelePrompter

“ What am I gonna tell the president? I'm gonna tell him his teleprompter is broken. What will he do then? ” — Vice President Joe Biden, May 27, 2009,
Commencement Address, U.S. Air Force Academy

Both as a candidate and as President, Obama has been praised as an orator even while commentators have noted his uncommonly frequent use of TelePrompters. Humorists parody this aspect of Obama's image and The Washington Post even claimed that Obama "has become known as the teleprompter president." Obama reportedly relied on speech prompting technology to deliver speeches to schoolchildren, short speeches, and even a campaign stop from the dirt floor of a rodeo arena.

Politico discussed the matter:

Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual — not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small. ...“It’s just something presidents haven’t done,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who has held court in the White House since December 1975. ...Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he's been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.

Obama's use of the technology at news conferences has been commented upon by veteran journalists; CNN's American Morning anchor John Roberts said he'd never before seen a president use a teleprompter at the start of a news conference and Associated Press Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier wrote, "What kind of politician brings a teleprompter to a news conference?" Noting a July 2009 incident in which Obama's equipment failed, one writer claimed, "President Obama was completely unable to speak or form a coherent sentence after somebody killed his precious Teleprompter."

Other journalists have defended Obama's consistent use of speech prompting technology, noting that Obama routinely participates in writing his own speeches, prefers a 'disciplined delivery of carefully crafted text', and is to be commended for 'sticking to his rhetorical plan'. Despite his image as reliant upon TelePrompter technology, Obama has not used the technology when responding to questions, yet his responses have been generally considered to be well-spoken even when constituting several minutes of extemporaneous speech.

Several widely reported incidents have tended to reinforce the image of Obama as dependent upon prepared script over off-the-cuff banter. For example, during a March 2009 appearance on NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Obama self-deprecatingly referred to his bowling ability as "like the Special Olympics or something." During a June 16, 2009 interview, Obama stated, "I've got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration.", immediately confirming he meant Fox News; this singling out of a specific news outlet was widely criticized. At the beginning of the Henry Louis Gates arrest controversy, Obama initially conceded, "I don't know all the facts" yet immediately opined, "the Cambridge police acted stupidly." Obama later clarified his remarks and invited the arresting officer to a "beer summit" at the White House with Obama, Biden, and Gates.

Obama's seeming unwillingness to modify his planned remarks has also reinforced this image. For example, Obama was to address an in-person audience at a previously-scheduled event when law enforcement and news outlets began reporting the Fort Hood shooting of November 5, 2009. His staff acknowledged that Obama was aware that his remarks on the massacre would be televised nationally and internationally, yet Obama began with more than two minutes of lighthearted event acknowledgments and a waving "shout out" to Joe Medicine Crow (who Obama mistakenly introduced as a Medal of Honor recipient). The incident was criticized as Obama's "Pet Goat moment", although far left commentators such as Media Matters characterized that comparison as a "Right-wing media attack" and opined that Obama's reaction was "not even remotely" like that.