Teleprompter malfunction

President Barack Obama doesn’t go anywhere without his TelePrompter.

The textbook-sized panes of glass holding the president’s prepared remarks follow him wherever he speaks.

Resting on top of a tall, narrow pole, they flank his podium during speeches in the White House’s stately parlors. They stood next to him on the floor of a manufacturing plant in Indiana as he pitched his economic stimulus plan. They traveled to the Department of Transportation this week and were in the Capitol Rotunda last month when he paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in six-minute prepared remarks.

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.

After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no luck.

This may be news to the throngs of Obamabots who elected him, but not to those of us who paid attention to Obama on the campaign trail.  When he had the TelePrompters, he made crowds swoon.  When he didn’t, though, things would go terribly wrong.  Most of the fumbles on the campaign trail —came when Obama had to go off script.  Once, his TelePrompter failed for a couple of moments and he stammered until someone apparently fixed it.

 

By comparison, President Bill Clinton was adept at continuing his prepared remarks, even when the TelePrompter failed.

 

Paul Begala recalls what happened when Clinton made a speech to a joint session of Congress. Despite a lot of planning and preparation, there was a snafu.

So the president gets up there, and he looks out at the screen and he sees it says, "William Jefferson Clinton"--we'd always put a heading on it--"William Jefferson Clinton, Address to Joint Session of Congress, A New Beginning for the American Economy." And he turns to Gore and he says, "Al, they've got the wrong speech up there." Gore says, "No, no, that's not possible." So Gore kind of looks down so he can see, and--so Gore calls George over and tells him, and they go through holy hell to try to find the speech.

Afterwards I asked Clinton, "What was going through your mind? I've got to know." First I went and apologized. I had played a role in that. I was terribly sorry. I wanted to make sure he knew that I felt responsible for it. He was utterly forgiving, not at all angry, and I said, "What did it feel like? What was going through your mind?" And he said, "Well, I stood up there, I saw it was the wrong speech, and I thought, "Well, Lord, I guess you're testing me. Okay, here goes." And with brimming self-confidence--now we had given him a backup text, but it was too small for him to read without his glasses. We had taken his glasses out of his pocket so there wouldn't be an unsightly bulge for the TV cameras.

So the poor guy is up there alone and naked on the most complex public policy issue, a fairly complex bill, and he went the first nine minutes without a note, and nobody could tell. It was phenomenal. Worse than that, the teleprompter screens are whizzing forward and backwards with last year's speech, trying to find it, and finally, they killed it all together and reloaded it. Nine minutes the guy went without a note, and no one could tell.