President Obama continued his habit of holding an event on the same day as a Republican presidential primary, but his spokesman denied any political motivation behind the scheduling, before suggesting that the Republican nomination could continue for months.
“[It’s] ridiculous unless you think that the President and all the actions that he took were taken for those reasons even in the first few months of his administration, which is, of course, patently absurd,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said of Obama’s decision to announce today that he is taking China to the World Trade Organization over a rare earth imports.
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Carney was responding to the claim that “it’s transparent he’s doing this now for electoral purposes.” The Washngton Examiner noted last week, when Obama scheduled his first press conference of the year to take place on the morning of the Super Tuesday elections, that the president often seems to schedule speeches and other news-making events that upstage the GOP calendar.
The press secretary denied any such political motives. “The fact that it takes place on a day when there are Republican primaries — competitive Republican primaries, I mean, throw some spaghetti at a calendar and find a day when there isn’t a competitive Republican primary,” he said. “And it’s possible that could be the case for many weeks going forward, I don’t know . . . the timing of this had everything to do with his schedule and the fact of the case, and not politics.”
