Barack Obama couldn’t resist teasing the reporters at his health and environmental press conference this morning. He opened by saying, “Before getting to the subject of today’s press conference, there are a couple of issues I’d like to address.” You could literally hear the journalists sitting up in their seats, eager for whatever tidbits he would drop about the Rod Blagojevich scandal. “Today we received more unsettling news about the economy,” he continued, sticking it to them.
Shortly after, he expanded on his earlier comments regarding the disgraced governor, who is accused of trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat. He said he was “appalled and disappointed” by the whole mess, and he reiterated that he “had no contact with the governor’s office.” He said he was “gathering all the facts” about his staff’s interactions with the State House staff, but that in any case, he was confident that his office “had no involvement in any deal-making around [his] Senate seat. That would be a violation of everything this campaign has been about.”
Oh, and also he announced the nomination of Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services and a White House office on health-care reform, where the former senator will introduce sweeping changes that may alter the country’s health-care system as we know it. But you didn’t care about that part, did you?
