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Obama fields questions in virtual town hall(Chicago Tribune Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) WASHINGTON _ Bringing a high-tech twist to the familiar forum of the town hall meeting, President Barack Obama on Thursday hosted a so-called "virtual" town hall in the East Room of the White House, answering questions from attendees and from participants online. The event, which was broadcast live by cable news networks, was the latest in a series of aggressive steps Obama has taken recently in an attempt to reach the public without relying on the traditional news media _ a tactic he employed with great success during his presidential campaign. To that end, Obama has picked his NCAA basketball tournament winners on ESPN, traded jokes with Jay Leno and telephoned astronauts on the space shuttle. Half of the questions posed to the president were selected in an online vote by visitors to the White House Web site, who were asked to choose among hundreds of thousands of suggested questions. Some 3.6 million votes were cast. The voting aspect drove traffic to the Web site, where the president's agenda could be read in gross detail. And since voters had to provide their name and e-mail address, it allowed the administration to build an e-mail list that could become a new messaging tool to reach the public. The town hall meeting is a favorite device for Obama's team. He employed it during his campaign to combat critics who said he was too aloof _ and to dispel the notion that he was a larger-than-life media creation. After the spectacle of the Democratic National Convention, he took to public libraries in Ohio and turbine factories in Pennsylvania _ all in an attempt to demonstrate that he had a common touch. At the time, Obama's objective was to persuade voters who were skeptical of him as a potential president. Now, it is to convince them that his policies will put the nation on the path to economic recovery. In both situations, the method has been similar: Interact directly with the public, both in person and on the Web. Former President Bill Clinton had hosted an online chat in 1999, back when people still used the term World Wide Web. Among other new elements, Obama allowed the public to choose which questions were most important to them. In the 48 hours prior to the event, nearly 93,000 people submitted 104,092 questions. In the end, however, he only answered six questions submitted online. But when voters came, they stayed awhile. The average visitor to the Web site voted 30 to 45 times, the White House said. "People are sitting down and engaging," said Macon Phillips, the president's director of new media. "When you have that many people, think of the distributive brainpower. People are coming together to collaborate." Aaron Smith, a researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said he found the level of interest among participants impressive. "It matches up with our research on what people expect from the administration," Smith said. Shortly after the election, survey respondents told Pew they wanted to continue to hear from Obama and his aides through the Internet. Some people in the demographic that Obama was trying to reach were enthusiastic about the event. "There's something transformative about this presidency when you see this sort of online forum. The office will never be the same," said J.C. Lee, 26, via the micro-blogging service Twitter. Lee is a Berkeley, Calif., playwright and director of The Future Leaders Institute in Oakland. Others were less impressed. "It's just another town hall," wrote Ed Pastore, 40, of Alexandria, Va., via Twitter. (EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE) Pastore, founder of the Metagovernment project to encourage participatory and "open source government," watched the town hall online and posted his reactions on Twitter. "Our expectations were lowered by the previous president's lack of technological savvy," Pastore said in a phone interview. "I think any president in this day and age should at least have a staff that knows how to use the Internet, for sure." While the town hall exchange was dominated by questions about health care and job creation, another burning issue would not go away: Questions about legalizing marijuana (there were 2,139 of them) were among the most popular, the president noted. "I don't know what this says about the online audience," Obama said, smiling as the audience laughed. "This was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered," he continued. "The answer is, no, I don't think that's a good strategy to grow our economy." "Every time they do one of these it's the No. 1 question," Pew's Smith said. "I thought it was interesting that they finally recognized that they had to answer it eventually, that it wasn't going away." ___ (Joanna Lin of the Los Angeles Times and Christi Parsons of the Tribune Washington Bureau contributed to this report.) ___ (c) 2009, Chicago Tribune. Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/ Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. _____ PHOTOS (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): obama For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. Copyright ? 2009 Chicago Tribune |