by John McCormick, updated
JOHNSTON, Iowa – It was a technique not previously seen at press conferences for Sen. Barack Obama.
As the Illinois Democrat stood behind a podium, his Iowa communications director, Josh Earnest, selected the reporters allowed to ask questions.
Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson was given the first question, followed by a series of other Iowa-based reporters.
But there was this pesky woman in the front row who refused to be ignored.
“It’s been a while,” said Chicago Sun-Times Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet, when she was told that preference was being given to Iowa reporters.
But Obama finally gave in.
“Alright, Lynn, go ahead,” he said, as the news conference was winding down.
Sweet asked where documents from his time as a state senate in Springfield are located.
“Nobody has requested specific documents,” he said.
(That’s not entirely true. The Tribune, as was reported in today’s edition, had requested documents from his time in Springfield and never received a response.)
“I was in the state senate for eight years,” Obama continued. “I had one staff person….I don’t have archivists in the state senate. I don’t have the Barack Obama state senate library available to me, so we had a bunch of file cabinets. I do not have a whole bunch of records from those years. Now, if there are particular documents that you are interested in, then you should let us know. But I don’t have – I don’t maintain – a file of eight years of work in the state senate because I didn’t have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records.”
Sweet pressed on: “When the office was packed up, where is the stuff.”
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Obama: “I’m not certain…It could have been thrown out. I haven’t been in the state senate now for quite some time.”
This afternoon, Obama’s campaign issued the following statement: “All of the records that the state considers to be public are currently available. This is as opposed to the millions of documents that should be publicly available from the Clinton White House that currently are not. In fact, tens of thousands of documents are currently being kept from public view by a representative of the Clintons.”
Tommy Vietor, Obama’s Iowa press secretary, later said that the selection of who was allowed to ask a question was simply a matter of trying to give Iowa reporters first crack. Still, it’s a balance that out-of-state and in-state reporters usually work out pretty well on their own.