Next Question

President Bush so rarely answers questions from the White House press corps that reporters try to make the most of the few opportunities they have. (Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

"I do believe Ariel Sharon is a man of peace," Bush replied, making headlines around the world.

Deconstructing the exchange, Moran says he finds that "focused, forceful and direct questions work best with Bush -- the shorter the better.

"He responds sharply to sharp challenges. He gives better answers to fact-based queries than to open-ended invitations to muse or reflect on events or policies. And sometimes, his Texan habit of answering direct questions quickly and directly leads him to make news inadvertently."

The White House does its own pre-game preparation, and one aide said Bush's staff often gets ready for "a Sanger question." That would be David E. Sanger, a national security specialist and White House correspondent for the New York Times, who says he finds it "most productive to ask about something that's not directly on the news of the day.

"Otherwise," he says, "no matter what the question is, you're likely to hear another version of the message of the day. So if the headlines are full of Iraq, ask about Social Security or North Korea or something that Vladimir Putin said about the Ukraine. . . . The biggest challenge is getting the president to reflect on choices that he has made, explore alternative paths he might have taken, or illuminate how he came to a decision."

CNN's John King says a rookie mistake is to ask questions that are too convoluted, allowing Bush to answer only the part he wants to. King says he makes sure his questions have "one, or no more than two elements."

Question formulation is one of the rare enterprises on which reporters collaborate, because they know only a few of them will be picked, and the others don't want a clever question to go to waste. Ed Chen, a White House reporter for the Los Angeles Times, keeps a running list of "just in case" questions on his Palm Pilot, his desktop computer and his laptop.

But even as prepared an interrogator as Chen is no match for a president who is determined not to answer. In the Rose Garden last summer, Chen asked Bush how he planned to promote his Middle East peace initiative during an upcoming trip to Europe. Bush responded that he would be "giving a speech at the Air Force Academy that will help answer your question."

"I won't be there," Chen parried, to laughter.

"Ed, they do have C-SPAN, you know," Bush replied. "I'll be glad to rent it for you for an hour."

Score one for a risk-averse, disciplined White House: Question asked, answer avoided, see you later. But every now and then, the press has its day. The master of the game is John Dickerson of Time magazine, who has knocked Bush off script so many times that his colleagues have coined a term for cleverly worded, seemingly harmless, but incisive questions: "Dickersonian."

And yet Dickerson's disarming charm has preserved his status as one of the few reporters whom Bush and his staff actually like, so he keeps getting called on. He once asked Bush whether Muslims worship the same Almighty as Christians. (Bush said they did, prompting a stir among some evangelicals.) In the Rose Garden two summers ago, Dickerson asked Bush his view of homosexuality, leading into it by noting that many of his supporters believe it is immoral. ("Yes. I am mindful that we are all sinners," Bush began, going on to make news by saying he had lawyers looking into a way to codify the sanctity of marriage, the prelude to his endorsement of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.)

In April, Dickerson asked one of the most famous questions of Bush's presidency: "In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you'd made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You've looked back before 9/11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?"

Bush did not have a tape ready to stick into his VCR and he struggled to improvise. "I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it," Bush said. He went on to say he could not think of a mistake he had made, providing months of fodder for his critics.

At the black-tie White House Correspondents' Association dinner a month later, Bush recounted the exchange and acknowledged, "It's an excellent question that totally stumped me. I guess looking at it practically, my biggest mistake was calling on John."

Dickerson, 36, says his mission when he questions Bush is to "get him to think out loud." He is the son of the late Nancy Dickerson, who was the first female correspondent at CBS News and was a longtime White House correspondent for NBC. "The first thing I think about when I think of question-asking is my mom," he writes in an e-mail. "Press writers were always writing about how she didn't belong there, how women couldn't ask serious questions and so it's probably osmosis." Dickerson says he thinks about "how Bush will react, what might shut him down, what might bore him, what might smell like a trap to him.

"He knows a lot about what we do and measures our motivations with a fine gauge," Dickerson writes. "There are a lot of hurdles with a president who doesn't particularly like the press and thinks we're there only to 'peacock,' as he calls it."

Dickerson says he also benefits from the traditional order at the rare presidential news conference -- first, reporters from wire services are called on, then networks, then national newspapers, then newsmagazines, radio and regional newspapers. "I have it easy because I'm in the back of the order and you guys have already softened him up," he says. "For all of his ability to stay on-message, he does recognize when he's repeating himself and so I get lucky because by the time he gets around to me, he's working on thinking up another answer."

Even with Dickerson's example, highly paid reporters still struggle. One correspondent who does not buy the widespread theory that deference is key is John Roberts of CBS News. He once was so persistent in asking Bush why he took the nation to war in Iraq based upon what Roberts called "sometimes flimsy or, some people have complained, nonexistent evidence" that Bush scolded sharply, "Hold on for a second. You're through, John."

Roberts said in a BlackBerry message yesterday from Andrews Air Force Base, where he was waiting to board the press plane to Canada, that Bush "has worked very hard to create an atmosphere of 'protocol' around all of his events" and uses stern looks to shoot down any question he doesn't want to take. "It's all part of the message-control regime at the White House, but it's not something the White House press corps should roll over and play dead for."

Ann Compton of ABC News, who has covered every president going back to Gerald R. Ford, says Bush surveys the crowd and will lock eyes with a reporter who is eager enough to get into the mix. "Questions to Bush get the best answers when they are tough but respectful," she says. "And not in French."