Recently, my friend Chris Widener (leadership expert, author and founder of Positively Republican – the largest GOP group on Facebook) asked me to be an occasional contributor to RedCounty.com, where he serves as an editor. Red County is dedicated to being a forum for conservative politics, with a special focus on state and local issues. Below is my first post for the site, which you can also see here. (As of 5/26 at 3:25 p.m. PT, my piece was the top-billed item on the Red County home page.)

10 Questions for the Obama Press Conference
By Scott Stanzel

Tomorrow, President Obama will have his first formal, solo press conference since July 22, 2009. By my calculation, that means the champion of transparency and openness in government will have gone 309 days (more than 44 weeks) without going toe to toe with the White House press corps. As someone who spent more than 7 years working on media relations for President George W. Bush in the White House and on his campaign staff, I can assure you reporters will come loaded for bear and have many pent up questions for President Obama.

Because President Obama has been stiffing the White House press corps for so long, press secretary Robert Gibbs and his staff have their work cut out for them in helping their boss prepare for tomorrow’s press conference. While I’m sure the Obama press office staff has been compiling potential press conference topics for weeks (if not months) and reporters likely have notebooks full of questions they had hoped to ask the president over the last 10 months, I thought I’d offer a few suggestions of my own in order to help both sides get the most out of this rare occasion. In a normal presidential press conference, 15 to 20 questions would be asked and answered in 45 to 75 minutes. Because President Obama tends to give very long answers to questions (some town hall answers have run more than 10 minutes), I’ve prepared just 10 questions for the Fourth Estate to consider employing at tomorrow’s press conference:

1. Mr. President, since it has been more than 10 months since your last solo press conference, can you tell us why you’ve been avoiding us? Are you afraid of the scrutiny from a free press? What message does this send to countries like China or Russia, both nations which we continually urge to create greater press freedoms?

2. At the signing of the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act on May 18, you invited the pool of reporters into the Oval Office to watch you sign the bill, but you refused to answer any questions. Were you trying to be ironic?

3. About a month ago, historic floods ravaged Nashville and other parts of Tennessee. The waters caused more than a billion dollars in damage and killed more than 30 Americans. Have you ever considered visiting the state to see the damage for yourself and to console the victims of this disaster? If yes, what prevented you from going? If no, don’t you think they deserve your attention?

4. Six months ago, Umar Abdulmutallab attempted to set off a bomb in order to kill passengers aboard a flight landing in Detroit. Instead of questioning him as an enemy combatant, your administration chose to question him for less than an hour and then read him his Miranda rights so he could obtain a lawyer. Was this your decision? If it wasn’t, should you have been in the loop? If it was, do you think this was enough time to obtain valuable information in order to prevent potential future attacks?

5. Shortly after the Christmas Day bomber incident, your Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said “the system worked” and indicated Abdulmutallab was likely a lone actor. Subsequently, it was discovered he had deep ties to terrorists and your Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently stepped down because of the critical intelligence lapses in the matter. Should Secretary Napolitano also step down?

6. It’s been more than a month since oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, but since we haven’t had an opportunity to talk with you about it, why has it taken you so long to visit the Gulf Coast? You are going there on Friday of this week, but it seems your Administration has been slow to recognize the severity of the issue. Do you wish you had paid greater attention to the spill? And, is the federal government in charge of the response, as Carol Browner said this week? Or, is BP in charge, as Admiral Thad Allen said this week?

7. Way back in March, you signed a health care overhaul that only Democrats in Congress supported and 15 percent of House Democrats actually opposed. Is this what you meant when you talked about “changing the way Washington works” as a candidate?

8. Shortly after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the law to try to enforce federal immigration laws at the state level, members of your Administration questioned its constitutionality. However, weeks later Attorney General Eric Holder and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano admitted they hadn’t even read the law. The law is less than 20 pages long. Isn’t it reasonable to ask members of your team to read laws before they criticize them?

9. In March, the North Koreans sunk a South Korean navy ship in an act of extreme provocation. Since we haven’t had a chance to talk to you in quite some time, do you still plan to “sit down without precondition” with Kim Jung Il, as you pledged you would during the presidential campaign? If you plan to keep that pledge, what will you say to the North Korean despot about this attack on South Korea?

10. Since it may be after Election Day before we are able to ask you questions again, will you state now, for the record, if you authorized members of your staff to offer Rep. Joe Sestak a job so he would drop his primary challenge to U.S. Senator Arlen Specter?

Those questions should get the ball rolling for a lively presidential debate. Set your DVRs to save the fireworks, folks. Mr. Transparency may not make an appearance for again for several hundred days.