For months, President Obama was like an ATM for the media, dispensing answers to questions with what seemed like just the push of a button.

The president was swamping the airwaves, printing presses and the Web with a nonstop fusillade of interviews, news conferences and even town hall meetings. In the latter arena, he would on occasion beg one of the locals with an opposing view to lob a question his way.

Some veterans of the White House press corps were reminded of the final year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when the increasingly irrelevant chief executive seemed willing to grab onto anyone who would listen.

But Obama in 2009 is deeply relevant, and for a long time was burning up the wires to the press corps and regular folks. Then suddenly, the line went dead.

Obama is still, in his overall stats, ahead of President George W. Bush , who viewed the press as a kind of a species of cactus. But in a White House that regularly touts itself as a beacon of “openness” — and in some ways it has been — Obama in recent months has demonstrated that when he thinks he needs a little opaqueness, he can make it happen.

The president’s last full-dress U.S. press conference was nearly four months ago, a prime-time appearance in the East Room on July 22.

Since landing on five Sunday news programs Sept. 20 — amid a great clamor that he was overexposing himself — the president has infrequently taken questions in public.

Instead, with his health care bill hanging in the balance and in need of careful lobbying, Obama takes most of his questions from lawmakers privately at the White House or on the phone. This, of course, is a far cry from the health care deliberations that candidate Obama promised to air on C-SPAN.

And while delicate discussions are waged in private White House war tribunals, Obama avoids having to take queries that might get him to tip his hand or force him to look obstructive by refusing to answer.

A Senate Democratic leadership aide said Democrats scrambling to pass health legislation don’t mind Obama stepping down from the public soapbox.

“I don’t have any issues with it,” the aide said. “I’m not so sure we’re playing for public opinion right now.” He asserted that the Senate, which plans to begin considering its health reform bill this week, wants the same treatment Obama gave the House — a private push to get the bill over the top.

Towson University professor Martha Kumar, who studies White House interactions with the press and tracks the president’s public appearances, suggested Obama aides have calculated that there is less benefit in having the president wade in while the process of resolving his two biggest issues — health care and Afghan war strategy — continues.

“They like to deal with situations that are resolved,” she said. “No president likes to talk about issues when they are in flux.”