Obama gives first press conference in 3 months

Politico reports

The world has whirled in the 15 weeks since President Barack Obama last held a big press conference — and the questions have stacked up to his presidential seal.

One central question looms as Obama faces the media in the East Room on Wednesday, and one for which he isn’t likely to offer a concrete answer: Will Obama accept any debt ceiling deal with Republicans that doesn’t include some kind of tax increase on the wealthy?

Besides the fast-approaching showdown on the debt ceiling, the Obama-starved White House press corps also is likely to press the president — a constitutional lawyer – for a more detailed explanation of why the War Powers Act shouldn’t apply to his limited and divisive Libya intervention. Many Republicans and Democrats have insisted that it should.

Another intriguing line of inquiry: How does Obama, a champion of a cleaner and more transparent political process, feel about criticism from good-government advocates that he engaged in a legal, but arguably unseemly, outreach to woo big Democratic donors at a briefing session in the White House residence sponsored by the Democratic National Committee?

The hailstorm of questions on these and other topics will take place against a changing backdrop: The last time Obama met the press, there wasn’t a single declared GOP candidate for president. Now there’s a swarm, and every one of them is blaming him for everything that ails the U.S. economy — and the rest of America’s problems as well.

“I think obviously he is going to continue to face questions about the economy. … You’re kind of on a collision course with the economy,” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at University of South Florida who thinks that Wednesday’s event, unlike previous news conferences, will be viewed through the prism of the upcoming 2012 campaign.

“Americans are very impatient, and I think that is going to be a challenge for him,” McManus added. “It’s his biggest challenge to show people that he’s met some of his promises. It’s checklist time, voters are starting to check off, ‘have you done what you said you would do?’”