President Barack Obama began his first press conference since November prepared to talk about housing. It took only a few minutes for it to become a full court press on foreign policy.
Let’s take a few minutes to view the movement of what could have been an interesting housing discussion turn into a mostly useless discussion of foreign policy. Kindly ignore the little time stamps given by Twitter, I grabbed these tweets at different times.
It starts off promising with a tweet from the Department of Housing and Urban Development:
It got started, and — as you can see in this tweet from The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza — it included a swipe at the GOP candidates like all good President Obama housing chats do.
Then, the speech on housing ended. The first question? Well, logically, foreign policy.
And that was it for housing, as CNN’s Donna Brazile notes.
But why? I ask.
Then my answer came from The New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum: Because foreign policy is sexier, obviously.
The time between the start of the presser and the first question? A bit less than 15 minutes. And that, ladies and gentleman, is how long it takes the national media to go from refinancings for struggling homeowners and housing for veterans to the possibility of launching an assault on Syria.
jhuseman@housingwire.com
