An inconvenient question hangs over President Obama’s first formal press conference of 2015: Why didn’t he attend a unity rally in Paris after the deadliest terror attack in decades there?
Obama, hosting British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House, would prefer that the leaders’ appearance in front of the cameras Friday focuses on U.S-European trade or even joint efforts to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Yet, Obama will almost certainly be asked why he didn’t join Cameron, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders at the Paris event. His aides have been on cleanup duty all week, but Obama has not yet publicly addressed the matter.
Aware of the political firestorm surrounding Obama’s absence in Paris, White House aides acknowledged they should have sent an official to France with a “higher profile.” The White House typically does not admit fault in controversies it considers mere optics.
Still, the White House has tried to distance Obama from the decision, saying it was not the president’s call and that security concerns complicated the prospect of sending him to Paris.
Yet, analysts involved in crafting presidential messages say Obama should offer no such caveats when sharing the stage with Cameron and instead give a full mea culpa.
“I think he should at least consider saying, ‘I’m glad to be here with Prime Minister Cameron; I should have been standing there next to him in Paris,’” said Linda P. Schacht, a press official in President Jimmy Carter’s White House who now teaches political communications at Lipscomb University.
“A basic rule of thumb is to understand the environment you’re walking into and defuse the major issue you’d like to not spend several questions and follow-ups on,” she added.
Obama’s answer could go a long way in determining how long questions linger about a snub that even some Democrats said was tone-deaf.
Conservatives have also argued that the episode was indicative of Obama’s mindset on combating terrorism and a concerted approach to minimize the dangers of overseas terror cells to the American public.
Another subplot in the press conference Friday is whether Cameron will be asked to weigh in on Obama not traveling to Paris.
Schacht said it was likely that Obama and Cameron would coordinate answers before addressing reporters to avoid further stoking the controversy.
“The more interesting part might be the questions Cameron gets about Obama’s absence,” she said. “Obama needs Cameron to publicly be in his corner.”
Obama and Cameron have taken great strides to showcase their close relationship, a dynamic that at times mirrors the interactions of George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In a recent interview with the Daily Mail, Cameron revealed Obama calls him “bro” and added that the president “has said the special relationship is stronger than it has ever been privately and in public, and I agree.”
The timing of the Cameron’s visit to the White House is intentional. He is facing a tough re-election fight in May, and sharing the stage with the leader of the free world gives Cameron some badly needed star wattage.
Beyond the normal pleasantries, however, Cameron is also seeking commitments from Obama.
Cameron would like Obama to come out against the types of encryption technologies that can’t be unscrambled. The British prime minister says that such methods keep national security agencies from accessing information useful in terror investigations.
“The fact that Cameron’s side so publicly pushed his agenda ahead of the [White House] meeting would suggest that he thinks he can win over the president” on encryption, a former Obama counterterrorism adviser told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t see it happening, though.”
Cameron’s encryption proposal is toxic in the tech community, as titans such as Facebook and Apple say such coding is needed in the wake of revelations about National Security Agency surveillance techniques.
While those talks play out behind closed doors, many in the White House press corps will await Obama’s reasoning for not attending the Paris rally.
Already, some of Obama’s allies are attempting to frame the Paris fallout as old news.
“The shelf life of these things is incredibly short,” said former Delaware Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman, Vice President Joe Biden’s longtime Senate chief of staff, who succeeded him briefly in the upper chamber. “If you look back, we move from one media fascination with something Obama’s done wrong to the next. All these little mess-ups, they tend to blow over.”
