"Newser" Play-By-Play

Marc Ambinder has an wonderful post today (he calls it a travelogue) that gives a play-by-play 0f the presidential news conference that took place last night. It gives an amazing front-row view of the happenings in a world that is not frequently made accessible to most people.

At 7:00, a press aide began to escort us up the stairs, round a bend, and through the famous front doors of the White House. Don't try to bring water into the residence --- they'll confiscate it. I snuck some in anyway.

Then we wait. Most of us have prepared questions, even though there's a roughly one in twenty chance that we'll be asked. Actually, fewer than one in 20, because all the network correspondents get a question. Last night, Fox's Major Garrett didn't, but maybe the White House was retaliating because the Fox network decided it did not want to lose more money and refused to air the presser.

The more experienced correspondents amble in later; the eager beaver newsbies -- like me -- get in there early, even though we have assigned seating. Last night, I was placed between the New York Post's Charlie Hurt and the presidential historian Martha Joynt Kumar. CSPAN's Steve Scully escorted Helen Thomas, still the dean of the press corps, to her front-row seat.

After spending some time chatting with Kumar about the history of presidential press conferences, I joked around a bit with the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza about seating: what would it take to get Chuck Todd to rush out -- so we could grab his seat in the front row? We recalled a Murphy Brown episode where the lead character telephoned her network's White House reporter and told him that his wife was in labor. The reporter bolted and Murph got the seat.