Given the attention given the office, presidents dominate the news cycle whether they want to or not. John Dickerson comments on how Obama handles this task:
At one point in the back-and-forth with reporters over Iran, the president said, "I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I'm not. OK?" It was a good line. He has used a version of it in a previous press conference. But while the president doesn't like the demands of the news cycle, he knows just how to feed it. When outrage over AIG bonuses gripped the news cycle, he appeared before cameras to channel it. When Sonia Sotomayor's remarks about being a "wise Latina" caused controversy, Obama and his team knew it was better to say she misspoke than to keep arguing that she'd been taken out of context. During his campaign, Obama scrapped his opposition to wearing a flag pin for the same reasons. By modifying his position or habits a little, Obama feeds the news beast and the overheated controversy goes away.
In some ways the president is the 24-hour news cycle. He's everywhere—cable, sports channels, and late-night talk shows. He'll be on ABC tomorrow talking about health care. At the press conference he showed just how attuned he is to the rapacious news environment. He called on the Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, who has been following the Iran story closely, and asked him to relay one of the questions he'd gotten from one of the Iranian protesters.* The White House had called Pitney that morning to invite him over to ask the question, an act of stagecraft for which the previous president would have been excoriated by his critics.
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For better or worse, this ability to adapt tends to determine the success or failure of presidencies. But while it allows presidents to adjust to the shifting political environment, it can raise questions regardign how firmly a president stands on certain issues. Are there areas where he will not budge. We'll see whether Obama falls into this trap.
