Given his experience in law and politics as a constitutional law professor, state senator, U.S. senator, and president of the United States, President Barack Obama ought to know and understand by now that holding public office requires interacting with people on a sometimes unexpected basis. He has, after all, been at the apogee of the American political system — the presidency — for more than three years. During that term, he has been presented with as many learning opportunities as he has crises and controversies (and I mean that in the sense that a crisis or controversy is a learning opportunity).

For better or worse, popular opinion of the presidency as an office is such that one journalist was eager to ask an out-of-turn question of Obama at a recent press conference in the White House Rose Garden and continue the interruption as an argument.

During the news conference in which Obama announced that his administration would not deport immigrants who came to the United States illegally if they did so before they were 16 years old, among other things, Neil Munro spoke up and asked what, if he had been called upon, would probably have been a reasonable question: whether policy that allows illegal immigrants to work is good policy for Americans already allowed to work legally.

Munro later claimed that he did not mean to interrupt Obama in such an untimely way, but his continuation of the altercation reflects an attitude toward our head of state and only national politician that is unfortunate. Also unfortunately, such is the nature of our politics these days: In order to lash out against the president, people such as Munro and Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., (the one who shouted “You lie!” during an address Obama made to Congress in September 2009) lash out against his office.

Even so, Obama should have been better prepared than he was to deal with the event and its aftermath. His reaction to the reporter’s heckling was just as childish and unprofessional as the reporter who spoke out of turn and kept on speaking out of turn.

Members of the press corps do have a vital role to play in a free political system. Often referred to as the fourth branch of government, supplementing the executive, judicia, and legislative, journalists are charged with providing people with the information they need to know in order to make informed, responsible decisions.

And along with the unpaid attendees of political or campaign events who also take it upon themselves as citizens to ask sharp questions of the men and women who lead our country, journalists play an important role as hecklers. One political analyst, Henry Fairlie, has crystallized that role into a key concept. By interacting with the politician on a stage delivering a speech, by doing something unexpected that he has to confront off-script, hecklers dissolve crowds into masses of individuals who are all capable of such action. The crowd ceases to be an aggregation of passive recipients and becomes an assembly of individuals of whom the politician needs more than consent — he needs their collaboration.

In the early years of the American republic, John Adams noted that one of the Constitution’s insights is that the presidency is designed to, albeit functioning as one of the three branches of a balanced government, represent the “monarchical principle” in government. What that means is that the executive will be unified in one person who is elected from across the whole country and who, then, is supposed to represent the whole country. To perform such nationwide representation well, the president should be the best of the best politicians on hand in the United States at the time of his election.

Part of the president’s “bestness” as a politician deals with an ability to accept things and move on, dispensing them with a few words rather than saying “Excuse me, sir,” raising a finger into the air, and saying “It’s not the time for questions, sir, not while I’m speaking.” As if that distraction from his message and validation of Munro were not enough, Obama continued to reference the incident.

If he wants the presidency to be surrounded with decorum and propriety, Obama needs to acknowledge what needs to be acknowledged — but only for so long as it needs to be acknowledged. He ought to take a lesson from one of my professors: One of the best ways to move on from an interruption is to acknowledge the matter’s trivial interest, and move on. “That’s very interesting, but irrelevant,” the professor says.