I tuned into President Obama’s East Room statement/press conference this evening mainly to see if he’d use the teleprompter. He did use it during the first segment of his remarks and I think it hurt him.

The prompter, as I noted earlier, is designed to help the speaker look at his audience more naturally. In a large setting, the audience is all around him. But tonight, as the president pressed the case for passing an economic stimulus bill, his audience wasn’t (shouldn’t have been) the reporters and staffers assembled in the East Room; his audience was the American people watching on TV at home. Instead of looking directly into the camera and talking to Americans, the president looked at the teleprompter panels and almost never looked into the camera. It diminished the forcefulness of his message.

It’s not a big deal, but if the president’s going to rely on the teleprompter every time he makes remarks, his staff ought to work out a solution — like a camera-mounted teleprompter — that will allow him to address the right audience.