POTUS and TOTUS: Obama and the teleprompter meme

March 19, 3:46 PMDC Liberal ExaminerPaul Fidalgo

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BFFs? (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

I had to have someone explain the joke to me. A Republican former classmate of mine had posted a link on his Facebook page to a humorous blog purported to be written by President Obama's teleprompter, in which the anthroposcribic (yes, I just made that word up) device talks about his fun adventures with the Big Guy. Very cute.

But of course, it's assumes the reader already thinks it's funny how often Obama uses a teleprompter. I've heard plenty of Republicans knock the president for his alleged over-reliance on the device, but it always seemed to me to be mainly a lame way to bring a really great orator down a few notches. "Oh yeah? Bet he couldn't deliver that speech without a teleprompter! HA!" Good one.

If it was genuinely funny for some reason, though, I just didn't get it. But I wanted to! I know, I'm the "Liberal Examiner" and all that, but I really do prefer to find the funny and ridiculous in all politicians, even those with whom I agree most of the time (and I have not held back from expressing my concerns about the president here either). If there was a good, quality comic meme to be had here, I wanted in on it.

My GOP Facebook friend simply told me that Obama obviously performs worse without the teleprompter than with, and compared that to our previous president who was an unmitigated oratorical disaster no matter what was in front of him. But I wondered; does Obama's reliance reach truly comic levels, comparable to W's?

I worked in media research during a chunk of the presidential primaries last year, and I watched a lot -- a lot -- of then-Senator Obama. Indeed, it was certainly clear that there was one venue in which his main competition, then-Senator Clinton, was leaving him in the public speaking dust: the debates. And at debates, you don't get a teleprompter (though most questions were so laughably predictable as to render the need for them moot). Obama was often halting and awkward in his responses, and to this day he tends to preface far too many non-cued answers to questions with, "Now, what I have said is this . . ." -- as though every sentence was a footnote to a sentence he had uttered at some time in the past, which itself was probably also prefaced the same way.

But have mercy, he wasn't embarrassing himself. I know George W. Bush is a low watermark, but Obama has (I don't think) ever come close to sounding as breathtakingly stupid as Bush.

Looking back at a Politico piece from last week by Carol E. Lee (that I had intentionally avoided precisely because I thought the teleprompter topic was a waste of pixel space), it seems clear from the reporting that Obama uses it a great deal more than previous commanders-in-chief. I suppose that's potential joke fodder, but it has yet to strike me as blatant enough to be universally guffaw-worthy. Indeed, the Politico piece seems more upset about how the teleprompter makes it difficult to get better pictures at events. So if he uses the teleprompter, it's an artificially theatrical construction, which hinders the press's enjoyment of a different artificially theatrical construction. Seems like a fair trade to me.

And this whole topic dawned on me mere hours after the president had completed his town hall appearance in California last night. I saw the vast majority of it, and without a prompter, cue card, or notes on a napkin, I think he did a hell of a job tackling some pretty difficult material. He didn't seem to need a "crutch" -- as the Lee called it twice in her article -- that night.

But let there be no doubt: the idea of Obama's teleprompter writing its own blog, a la Fake Steve Jobs, is a really funny idea, whether Obama overuses it or not. And you have the love the newly-minted acronym for it: TOTUS.

Of course, in the end, I'm more concerned about what is coming out of his mouth than how it gets into his brain. If he needs his speeches written in braille, delivered by semaphore 100 yards back, or needs Joe Biden to whisper the lines into his ear, I'd still rather have something like his Philadelphia speech on race than not. If he needs a teleprompter to make things like that happen, prompt away, TOTUS. Hail to the idiot board.