Press Conference prep and backstory

The president has a news conference scheduled for this evening. It's his first in six weeks (about on par for what he'd said to the New York Times about holding a news conference approximately once a month).

The history of presidential press conferences goes back to Woodrow Wilson in 1913, and it's moderately interesting. But even more interesting, I think, is the way that Chuck Todd of NBC approaches tonight's presser: his comments reminded me of how Judy Garland lost patience with the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz:

“The beauty of these press conferences for the president is that you look like you’re open and taking questions, when really it’s the most controlled setting you have for taking questions,” Todd said. “It’s more controlled than a sit-down interview because one-on-one, you get follow-ups. Here, you can move around and change topics.”

Bingo! The built-in "architecture" of a press conference is well-suited to most presidents, but especially this president, because, as David Warren notes, "He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as 'avant-garde.' "

Except for his steadfast adherence to a progressive ideology that he'd rather the rest of us called "pragmatism" or "postpartisanship" because he fancies himself smart, centrist, and non-ideological, you could make a case that President Obama fits among those whom J.C. Ryle described as "legions of 'jelly-fish' young men annually turned out from our universities, armed with a few scraps of second-hand philosophy."

POSTSCRIPT: An observation after the fact, to go with a report from Andrew Malcolm.