What’s He Going to Talk About?

Yesterday, the President scheduled an unexpected press conference for this evening. What’s he got on his mind? Scott McClellan said that the conference had been planned for a couple of weeks, but apparently the White House hadn’t bothered to tell anybody. This is a guy who hates to answer any questions that haven’t been carefully screened (although, judging from past performances of the liberal media, he’s got nothing to worry about), so he must feel this is a necessary evil. Will he try to give us a rah-rah, ain’t-it-great-how-Social-Security-reform-is-going-so-well session? (He’s just back from his barnstorming tour of the country in support of that reform, which he’ll not doubt claim was a rousing success--oddly, though, for some reason public support of the idea [he’s yet to issue an actual “plan”]) has dropped.) Will he declare his undying devotion to Tom DeLay and/or John Bolton? Will he repeat yesterday’s pitch for nuclear power and oil refineries? And how will the White House press corps respond? They’ve been getting barely more confrontational now that the President’s approval ratings have fallen. Will they just take whatever he’s willing to feed them, or will they challenge him at all? Will they feel more empowered knowing that Jim/Jeff Guckert/Gannon isn’t present to toss the President a lifeline question about Democrats being out of touch with reality? (And all along, I thought Democrats’ supposed problem was they were stuck in the reality-based community.) The Washington Post just reported that Bush will talk for a full 10-12 minutes about energy and Social Security, maybe even offering his much discussed but never-before-revealed plan for the latter (that’s what I get for taking so much time to craft these postings--the news goes and happens without me). Tune in to find out.

Well, maybe you can tune in. With a scheduled start time of 8:30 EST, Bush steps right into the first night of May sweeps. Will the networks preempt the second half of Survivor: Palau or The O.C., the entirety of Will & Grace, or the second half hour of Sweet Home Alabama for the President to talk to the nation and the press? As I write this, the four net Websites show no programming changes for this evening, but Internet Movie Database reports that FOX has decided to air the press conference. ABC is another possibility, because how much of a ratings draw is Sweet Home Alabama, anyway? But CBS and NBC? The President is likely to run over into CSI and The Apprentice. Don’t forget a couple of months ago how CBS was lambasted for interrupting the climax of CSI: New York with the not insignificant little tidbit that Yasser Arafat was dead. And NBC has so little ratings success to hold onto these days, that it can’t afford to let The Donald sit idle.