If you think it would be tremendously exciting to interview President Obama, you should know that things tend to be quite dry once you get past the thrill of meeting the most powerful man on Earth.
With less than a week until the tremendously critical midterm elections, Obama is not taking any chances by speaking openly about important issues, as a few bloggers found out in a White House roundtable yesterday:
Q Since you’ve become President, a lot has changed. More states have passed marriage equality laws. This summer a federal judge declared DOMA unconstitutional in two different cases. A judge in San Francisco declared Prop 8 was unconstitutional. And I know during the campaign you often said you thought marriage was the union between a man and a woman, and there — like I said, when you look at public opinion polling, it’s heading in the right direction. We’ve actually got Republicans like Ted Olson and even Ken Mehlman on our side now. So I just really want to know what is your position on same-sex marriage?
THE PRESIDENT: Joe, I do not intend to make big news sitting here with the five of you, as wonderful as you guys are. (Laughter.) But I’ll say this–
That response was perhaps the most telling of the entire interview, if not the entire campaign cycle. If ever you wondered whether the White House plans its announcements weeks in advance, or whether this president knows exactly what he’s going to say before he ever sets foot into an interview, you now have your answer. Trying to get Obama to improvise is a pipe dream.
Oh, and for the record, he says he’s still “a strong supporter of civil unions.”
-Cord Jefferson is a staff writer at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.