But I thought he was so brilliant and so with it and so in tune with us – what is he worried about?
With Congress away on recess, President Barack Obama is stepping up his sales pitch for health care reform, tapping online social media in a new end run around the traditional news filter.
At a town hall today in Annandale, Obama will answer questions from a live audience, and also from users of popular online communities including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
“The president wanted to continue the conversation that we started last week with town halls,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. It’s “a continuing conversation about how to move health care reform forward.”
Although the format opens up the opportunity for questioning Obama to a potentially limitless online audience, the White House controls which questions are asked.
The White House in April staged its first such “virtual” town hall on the economy and invited Internet users to post questions and vote on which ones the president should answer.
One of the leading topics chosen by participants was whether the United States should legalize marijuana as a way to curb drug violence in Mexico.
Obama laughed it off at the time, but the online voting feature is not part of the setup for Annandale. “This online town hall will be a little different than the last one,” the administration told users on its WhiteHouse.gov Web site post announcing the forum.
The probable worry here is the people will vote “how are we going to pay for this?” as a question to be asked. They also might decide to go off-topic a bit and ask why he wants to reach out to the newly bloodstained hands of the Iranian mullahs. In other words, as Obama’s Administration advances, there come ever larger numbers of questions Obama and Co would rather not be asked…so, the filters are on. By 2012, I’ll bet that only Obama’s immediate family and political donors are allowed to ask questions…
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