Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Ed Henry Explains His AIG Question

Huh? This guy's ego is obviously large enough to think that anyone really cares about his behind the scenes thinking strategy. It was a nice shut down by Obama. End of story. But this guy felt the need to explain:
CNN: The pressure was on now because the president had called on me. Someone handed me a microphone, millions were watching, and it's scary to think about changing topic in a split second because you might get flustered and screw up.

But it's fun to gamble and like any good quarterback (though I was never athletic enough to actually play the position), I decided to call an audible.

So I went hard on the AIG question, and took Wolf's advice and followed on a couple of colleagues who got pushback from the president when they asked about how his budget numbers do not seem to add up.

The president, like any good politician, decided to pick and choose what to answer. So he swatted away the budget question and ignored the AIG stuff.

So I waited patiently and then decided to pounce with a sharp follow-up. From just a few feet away, I could see in his body language that the normally calm and cool president was perturbed.

But it's in moments like that we sometimes find out what's really on a president's mind. In this case, he's not happy about the scrutiny on AIG. So he did slap me down a bit.

Anderson Cooper said later half-jokingly that yours truly was "nursing his wounds."

Even more comical to me was the flood of e-mail I got from Democratic and Republican sources.

Invariably, my Democratic friends tweaked along the lines of "how'd you like the smackdown" because they were pleased the president pushed back.

But my Republican friends hailed me by saying essentially, "Thanks for doing your job -- he never answered the question."

Ed Henry's ego is bruised, says Obama had a "flash of anger." Hardly. Irritation would better characterize the moment: