Photograph by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

President Barack Obama departs the White House on Feb. 4, 2013 to Minneapolis to tout his gun control proposals.

The release of the White House photo showing President Barack Obama shooting skeet at Camp David comes two days before Obama travels to Minneapolis to promote his agenda for curbing gun violence, following the Dec. 14 shootings of 20 schoolchildren and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, by a young gunman wielding his mother’s semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle.

The photo of the president, recorded Aug. 4, 2012 at Camp David, was taken on a summer Saturday — his 51st birthday — two weeks and a day after a young gunman walked into the Century 16 multiplex theater in Aurora, Colo., and opened fire with a Remington shotgun and a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 semi-automatic rifle and a 100-round drum ammunition magazine that jammed, forcing him to move on to his Glock handgun. The attack during the midnight showing of “The Dark Night Rises” claimed 12 lives and injured 58 other people.

The day after the president was shooting clay targets at Camp David, a gunman with a Springfield 9 mm semi-automatic pistol who had recently bought the gun and three 19-round ammo clips walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., and killed six people.

This picture was taken in the heat of a presidential campaign in which, despite the mass shootings that summer, neither Obama nor his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, were pressed to confront an issue that has haunted American society for years.

The release of the White House photo today clearly is an attempt by a president pressing for tougher gun controls to show that he understands the aims of law-abiding gun owners. Yet in many ways, the photo of the first gun-owner underscores something about the pervasiveness of firearms in American culture.

The president’s gun-promoting critics will not accept him as one of their own.

The Washington Times was quick to suggest that the commander-in-chief is no ordinary gun-owner. The paper quoted the CEO of Browning, Travis Hall, as saying of the shotgun pictured in the Camp David photo: ”I am fairly sure it is a Browning Citori.” The Times writes: “As the president is left handed, it could be the 12 gauge Citori 625 Sporting Golden Clays, adjustable comb, left hand. It features a gold engraving of a game bird transforming into a clay target on the receiver and retails for $4,799. ” (Various Browning Citori shotguns run between $3,200 and $7,000.)

And the Associated Press quoted a top official with the National Skeet Shooting Association as saying the White House photo suggests Obama is a novice shooter. ”This isn’t something he’s done very often because of how he’s standing, how he has the gun mounted,” said Michael Hampton, executive director of the San Antonio-based association.

The National Rifle Association, for its part, whose membership reportedly has boomed since the Newtown shootings, wasn’t offering the president any membership card today. The AP quoted  Andrew Arulanandam, NRA spokesman, as saying: ”One picture does not erase a lifetime of supporting every gun ban and every gun-control scheme imaginable.”

And then there was the photo itself. At a White House whose occupant suffered years of questioning about his citizenship and the authenticity of his Hawaiian birth certificate, officials today attempted to forestall all the likely Photoshop conspiracy theorists — likening a new breed of “Skeeters” to those nagging “Birthers.”

From David Plouffe (#whereistrump), manager of the first campaign and author of “The Audacity to Win:”

Attn skeet birthers. Make our day – let the photoshop conspiracies begin! m.flickr.com/photos/whiteho…

— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) February 2, 2013

Day made. The skeet birthers are out in full force in response to POTUS pic. Makes for most excellent, delusional reading. #whereistrump

— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) February 2, 2013

From Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director-turned senior adviser:

For all the “skeeters”: POTUS shoots clay targets on the range at Camp David on Aug. 4, 2012. bit.ly/WlDMYG

— Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) February 2, 2013

The picture is real.

We know Pete Souza, the White House photographer, a professional’s professional.

The president’s affinity with gun-owners remains a question, yet probably averts the real question here.

This photo of a sporting shoot two weeks after one massacre and the day before another, released as the president sets out to rally public support for gun controls following the most shocking mass shooting of all, isn’t likely to make any real connection between Obama and a gun-owning public. It’s simply another reminder that there’s probably nothing to worry about with guns in the hands of the right people. It’s the rest of them — and their high-powered weapons — that are the problem.

Original post is Obama’s $5,000 Shotgun Real McCoy, Wrong Question in Gun Control Debate? by Political Capital.

Photograph by Pete Souza/The White House

President Barack Obama shoots clay targets with a shotgun on the range on Aug. 4, 2012 at Camp David, Maryland.

The proof is in the picture.

After President Barack Obama allowed in a recent interview that he and friends shoot skeet “all the time” up at Camp David, cynics started to question why there are no photos of the clay-clobbering president at camp — Presidents from Dwight Eisenhower, who opened the skeet range at the camp named for his grandson, to John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush have been pictured plugging away at flying clay at the mountain retreat.

The White House today released a photograph of Obama skeet shooting at Camp David last August after some Republicans expressed doubts that the Democratic president had actually engaged in the activity revealed in that New Republic interview.

“Pull!” — the shotgun is smoking in this presidential photo by White House Photographer Pete Souza.

Obama, who is seeking a ban on assault weapons and other measures to reduce gun violence, told the magazine in its Feb. 11 issue that he shoots skeet “all the time” at Camp David and respects the nation’s hunting tradition. He was responding to a question about whether he had ever fired a gun.

The photo, sent to reporters via Twitter by White House spokesman Jay Carney and Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, shows Obama shooting clay targets on a range at Camp David Aug. 4.

Asked earlier this week about a photo of the president skeet shooting, Carney replied that when Obama “goes to Camp David, he goes to spend time with his family and friends and relax, not to produce photographs.”

Thereafter, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, expressed doubt about the president’s skeet shooting.

“You know, if you don’t have the photos, if this is not something that’s a new hobby, then I think he should invite me out to Camp David and I’ll challenge him,” Blackburn said on CNN. Asked for a reaction to Blackburn’s challenge, Carney responded, “I have none.”

The president will continue his pressure on Congress to curb gun violence when he speaks Monday at the Minneapolis Police Department’s Special Operations Center.  Obama has responded to the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting deaths of 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, with proposals to mandate background checks for all gun buyers, a ban on high-capacity ammunition clips and reinstatement of a ban on the sale of assault weapons.

With the photo in, we’re still waiting for the video, like this one of JFK and Jackie Kennedy learning to shoot skeet.

Original post is Obama Skeet-Shooting: Picture-Proof — JFK-Styled Video Next? by Political Capital.

Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio leaves his office and walks to the House floor to deliver remarks about negotiations with President Obama on the fiscal cliff, on Dec. 11, 2012, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

House Speaker John Boehner says he’s still waiting for the White House to get “serious” about spending cuts.

“Where are the president’s spending cuts?” Boehner, an Ohio Republican, asked on the House floor toda, adding that he is still “hopeful” the two can reach a budget agreement before the end of the year.

“The longer the White House slow-walks this process, the closer” the economy gets to the so-called fiscal cliff of  more than $600 million of tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in January, the speaker and lead negotiator in talks with the president said.

“Right now the American people have to be scratching their heads and wondering: When is the president going to be serious?” Boehner said on the House floor.

On Twitter, the White House was ready with a response.

“The irony of this is that the White House offer had very specific cuts, the GOP counter-offer had almost none,” Dan Pfeiffer, communications director for President Barack Obama, said in his Twitter message.

Roger Runningen contributed from the White House, Richard Rubin and Roxana Tiron from the Capitol.

Original post is Boehner: Get `Serious’ on Spending — White House: `Very Specific’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Pins during CarolinaFest 2012 ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

Updated at 2:55 pm EDT

President Barack Obama is relying on the argument that the economy could have been worse, except for his policies.

It’s a case that doesn’t lend itself to 30-second campaign ads or quick explanations.

It can work, says Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.

“The American public has a very nuanced understanding,” he said.

He was speaking at an event in Charlotte, North Carolina, sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers and Politico.

“They get that the president inherited a historic mess” and has been blocked by Republicans in some of his efforts to improve the economy, Pfeiffer contends.

The White House spokesman also sought to preempt Friday’s pending unemployment report from the Labor Department. Pfeiffer said  the monthly jobs figure is important but just “one of an array of factors” determining the economy’s health. And he said the number is “more focused on in Washington than by the average American.”

He also pushed back at critics of the president’s handling of the Simpson-Bowles debt commission. Pfeiffer said it is “one of the greatest myths of the Acela corridor” that, if only the president had endorsed the panel’s report, Republicans would have signed on to a debt deal that included $2 trillion in new revenue and deeper defense cuts than those contained in the pending sequester.

“It’s pure fiction,” Pfeiffer said.

David Lynch contributed to this report. 

Original post is Economy: Americans Get it, White House Communications Chief Says by Political Capital.