When I first heard that a high schooler had asked Jay Carney a question at yesterday’s White House press conference, I figured David Gregory was filling in for Chuck Todd.
But no. Apparently an actual high schooler – an intern for the Daily Caller named Gabe Finger – was unexpectedly called on by Carney:
Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson is having a blast attacking these people and defending Finger’s question, which he says was substantive. He’s right, and it’s a shame that it was, because a substance-free question asked by a high schooler and then dodged by Jay Carney would be the perfect distillation of the modern White House press conference. For years now, White House reporters have been herded into a pen to ask often-silly questions, only to have even their most vacuous inquiries go unanswered by the immovable Carney, and Robert Gibbs before him. The entire affair has become a masquerade, with everyone playing their part and no one ever learning anything, mined for drama by Washington publications like Politico and fastidiously ignored everywhere else in the country. A quick scan of yesterday’s transcript finds Carney back-slapping Harry Reid in his first answer, referring a reporter to the DOJ in his second (Carney spends a lot of time referring reporters to the DOJ), and giving press-release statements about Syria in his third and fourth. It’s this proud tradition to which Gabe Finger has brought shame.
At least Finger didn’t ask why the White House didn’t immediately call the press after the vice president shot his friend. David Gregory actually did that back in 2006.
I’ll leave you with a quote from my fellow blogger Luca Gattoni-Celli: “It was a 16-year-old whose job it is to act like a man versus a man whose job it is to act like a 16-year-old.”