Well, this time David Gregory didn’t brandish any weapons or show much firepower.

He pressed Barack Obama on a few points in the president’s appearance this morning, designed to seize control of the media narrative one day before the fiscal cliff deadline. But this was not the armed-and-dangerous Gregory we saw last week when he faced down NRA chief Wayne LaPierre.

Obama was measured and low key, which gave the NBC program the air of a press conference. And it is a bit harder to constantly get in a president’s face when you’re sitting in the White House.

Gregory did ask about Beltway “dysfunction”: “How accountable are you for the fact that Washington can’t get anything done and that we are at this deadline again?”

Asking about Obama’s line that the Republicans don’t like saying yes to him, the host asked: “What is it about you, Mr. President, that you think is so hard to say yes to?” (No soul-searching followed as Obama gave a programmatic answer.) Once he had exhausted his cliff questions, Gregory moved on to second-term priorities, bringing up guns: “You know how hard this is. Do you have the stomach for the political fight for new gun control laws.”

There were also questions on Benghazi and the nomination for secretary of State, with Gregory asking: “Do you feel like you let your friend Susan Rice hang out there to dry a little bit?”

And when Obama mentioned Lincoln, Gregory twinkled as he said: “Is this your Lincoln moment?” He was no Stephen Douglas.

The interview didn’t pop. It didn’t make any news. That was mainly Obama’s fault, thanks to his long monologues that were allowed to proceed uninterrupted. But Gregory could have showed a little more of the passion he displayed last Sunday.

http://daily-download.com/meet-president...ty-interview-2/

A low-intensity interview for low information voters.

It was to set up the GOP for his utter failure on the fiscal cliff talks.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administrati...before-deadline

President Obama said Sunday that the "pressure is on Congress" to reach a compromise and resolve the "fiscal cliff,” sharply criticizing GOP leaders for the unresolved talks.

In an interview with NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday, his first appearance there since the healthcare debate in 2009, Obama seemed intent on putting the blame solely on congressional Republicans if lawmakers fail to meet the pivotal year-end deadline.

"I offered not only a trillion dollars in — over a trillion dollars in spending cuts over the next 10 years, but these changes would result in even more savings in the next 10 years and would solve our deficit problem for a decade," Obama said, in the interview . “They say that their biggest priority is making sure that we deal with the deficit in a serious way, but the way they're behaving is that their only priority is making sure that tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are protected. That seems to be their only overriding, unifying theme.”
Obama said GOP negotiators have "had trouble saying yes to a number of repeated offers."

"If we're serious about deficit reduction, we should make sure that the wealthier are paying a little bit more and combine that with spending cuts to reduce our deficit and put our economy on a long-term trajectory of growth," Obama said, sitting in the White House's Blue Room for the interview, which was recorded on Saturday.

Did Gregory really ask him if this was his "Lincoln moment"?