Our Clever President By Tony Blankley

President Barack Obama's first presidential news conference was performed feebly by the once-ferocious White House press corps and shrewdly -- if deceptively -- by the president. In the six years I did communications on former President Ronald Reagan's White House staff, I don't recall a single news conference in which there were no follow-up questions, no challenges to anything the president had said recently, no assertions of fact that the president was challenged to deal with. In fact, I don't remember former President Bill Clinton, either, ever getting a full 45-minute prime-time news conference pass.

Yet Monday night, all the questions but one were of the "please, sir, could you tell us how you plan to deal with x?" variety. Only Major Garrett of Fox News raised even a slightly embarrassing question: What was Vice President Joe Biden referring to when he said the administration had a 30 percent chance of failing at some initiative? And I must confess that if I had been the vice president, I would not have been happy with the president's answer, which was, in essence: I don't know what Biden was talking about, but that sounds like him....