As published for Red County on May 26th, 2010:

Tomorrow, President Obama will have his first formal, solo press conference since July 22, 2009. By my calculation, that means the champion of transparency and openness in government will have gone 309 days (more than 44 weeks) without going toe to toe with the White House press corps. As someone who spent more than 7 years working on media relations for President George W. Bush in the White House and on his campaign staff, I can assure you reporters will come loaded for bear and have many pent up questions for President Obama.

Because President Obama has been stiffing the White House press corps for so long, press secretary Robert Gibbs and his staff have their work cut out for them in helping their boss prepare for tomorrow’s press conference. While I’m sure the Obama press office staff has been compiling potential press conference topics for weeks (if not months) and reporters likely have notebooks full of questions they had hoped to ask the president over the last 10 months, I thought I’d offer a few suggestions of my own in order to help both sides get the most out of this rare occasion. In a normal presidential press conference, 15 to 20 questions would be asked and answered in 45 to 75 minutes. Because President Obama tends to give very long answers to questions (some town hall answers have run more than 10 minutes), I’ve prepared just 10 questions for the Fourth Estate to consider employing at tomorrow’s press conference:

1.       Mr. President, since it has been more than 10 months since your last solo press conference, can you tell us why you’ve been avoiding us? Are you afraid of the scrutiny from a free press? What message does this send to countries like China or Russia, both nations which we continually urge to create greater press freedoms?

2.       At the signing of the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act on May 18, you invited the pool of reporters into the Oval Office to watch you sign the bill, but you refused to answer any questions. Were you trying to be ironic?

3.       About a month ago, historic floods ravaged Nashville and other parts of Tennessee. The waters caused more than a billion dollars in damage and killed more than 30 Americans. Have you ever considered visiting the state to see the damage for yourself and to console the victims of this disaster? If yes, what prevented you from going? If no, don’t you think they deserve your attention?

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