Go ahead, ask him anything

Romenesko today collects a consensus of press views on yesterday's Bush news conference: that the Pres. was particularly unhelpful. Maybe the best link is to this Time magazine piece:

The event felt more like an intervention, with a psychoanalytic press corps trying to goad the president into admitting that he had made a mistake, if not in the run up to 9/11, then in his administration’s cheerful prediction that coalition forces would be met with cheers or that there’d be weapons of mass destruction turned into ploughshares when the U.S. pulled into Baghdad. They tried to make the press conference a presidential 12-step program. But Bush wasn’t going to go down that road. Sure, he said he’s thought about what he might have done differently. But when my colleague John Dickerson asked the president if he could think of any mistake he’d made since September 11, a tongue-tied Bush couldn’t think of one. “Maybe I’m not as quick as I should be,” he said.

Yeah, I managed to listen to about 40 minutes of it on the radio, sitting at a corner in Berkeley marking up a chapter by one of the members of my writing group.