Beyond Obama's Town Hall

President Obama fielded eight questions from guests at his town hall event Thursday, including one from the instantly famous eight-year-old Ethan Lopez. It is obviously great for the President to directly interact with citizens, especially as the nation makes such big choices about how to address the economic crisis. Why should the opportunity be arbitrarily limited, however, to people who happened to attend a packed presidential event in one part of the country?

There's no good answer.

At least, not anymore. People used to argue that local events were the only way for a President to hear directly from citizens, but network technology has opened up our civic possibilities, as the Obama campaign showed. It's past time we used these tools to open up the Presidency.

That's what we're trying to do with the new project Ask The President -- as the Columbia Journalism Review explains in a new piece:

An idea whose time has come…came this morning. A coalition of journalistic outlets-- among them The Nation, The Washington Times, the Personal Democracy Forum, Change.org, and Color of Change--launched "Ask The President," an initiative aimed at including citizen questions in presidential press conferences. The process is straightforward: users submit questions they want President Obama to answer, and other users vote on the question they most want to hear asked--one vote per IP address .... This generates, in turn, a list of most-popular questions. The coalition of participating outlets then selects a credentialed journalist to attend the next press conference; that journalist, based on his or her judgment and on what's already been addressed at the conference, will select one of the questions from the list to ask Obama.

The journalist in question would be there solely to represent the citizens' query; he or she, per Ask The President's plan, wouldn't take question time away from the standing pool of White House reporters. Which means that, for the initiative to work, President Obama will have to agree to take part in it--to call on the citizen-representative journalist in addition to his traditional-journalist slate.

But, then, this is a president, of course, who has pledged to make his administration "the most open and transparent in history"; he'd be hard-pressed not to go along with the initiative. "The East Room press conferences are among the most exclusive and least democratic public gatherings in American politics," Ari Melber writes in a Nation article introducing the initiative; "the White House controls who attends and who gets called on.... Obama has repeatedly pledged a more innovative, interactive government. Wide public engagement in "Ask the President"--and strong political support for Obama's participation--can make that pledge a reality."

Well, it can start to make that pledge a reality. My question for Obama: how quickly will you pledge your participation?

Good question. There are plenty more -- and you can add your own -- at the Ask The President site.

Comments (5)

1. I watched both of those town meetings. This man isn't going to be easily cowed is he. Olbermann did a pre thing on the Leno show. there is one thing about bowling. That was one of those Biden things that he is Going to have to do a lot of mia culpas about. That what Michelle keeps warning him about. "Don't you blow this buster". She said quietly.

   Posted by julien38 at 03/19/2009 @ 9:45pm

2. RIO/comanche can ask "Why are you so evil and when are you going to throw me in a concentration camp?"

   LOL

   Posted by Mask at 03/19/2009 @ 9:49pm

3. Posted by snowball666 at 03/19/2009 @ 10:06pm

   Hank's too "squishy liberal" to be RIO/comanche....

   he's Hank's dad, Cotton.

   Posted by Mask at 03/19/2009 @ 10:41pm

4. I know it is difficult for leftist; Obama and Your Electric Bill by Ernest Istook 03/19/2009

   President Obama's energy tax plan -- a version of the failed European "cap and trade" global warming fiasco -- may cost families $1,800 yearly in higher utility bills, far exceeding his promised $800 a year tax cut for 95% of Americans.

   While campaigning, Obama admitted that his energy plan would cause electric bills to "skyrocket." Few took note, perhaps because Sen. John McCain also backed some form of a "cap-and-trade" energy tax.

   Obama's official budget claims that his proposed energy tax would add $646 billion to energy costs over 8 years. But that's low-balling it.

   As the Washington Times reported: President Obama's climate plan could cost industry close to $2 trillion, nearly three times the White House's initial estimate of the so-called "cap-and-trade" legislation, according to Senate staffers who were briefed by the White House. . . . At the meeting, Jason Furman, a top Obama staffer, estimated that the president's cap-and-trade program could cost up to three times as much as the administration's early estimate of $646 billion over eight years.

   Put another way, Furman estimates the cap-and-trade scheme will cost, on average, $250 billion annually. That estimate must be taken seriously because Furman is deputy director of Obama's National Economic Council. So what does this mean to everyday Americans? Let's put those numbers into context.

   Total electricity sales (business and residential combined) run about $343 billion a year (according to 2007 Department of Energy figures). Throw in our other energy expenses -- gasoline, natural gas, etc. -- and the U.S. Department of Energy estimates our total energy spending at "over $500 billion.

   Posted by comancheamerican at 03/19/2009 @ 11:05pm

5. So Obama's $250-billion a year energy tax could approach a 50% increase in what you, as a consumer, pay for energy, since all costs are passed along to consumers. Yet the Obama budget audaciously claims that it will "reduce utility bills"

   According to the White Fence Index, the average home utility bill is $297 per month, which is about $3,600 per year. So a 50% increase would be $1,800 per year under the Obama proposal. This far exceeds a Heritage Foundation projection of $467 a year in higher utility bills under an earlier U.S. Senate energy tax plan. That less-aggressive plan, though, could have cost 500,000 to 1 million jobs, according to Heritage. Who knows how many jobs would be lost under Obama's more burdensome plan? The lost jobs would become "gangrene jobs," a counter to Obama's claim to create new "green jobs."

   The White House and Mr. Furman try to justify drastically higher energy costs by offsetting it with their plan to give 95% of American families a permanent $800 per year "Making Work Pay" tax credit. (42% of that "tax cut" would actually go to people who don't pay any income tax.) But even with the $800 subsidy, the net loss is $1,000 per family per year.

   Obama also proposes to use the new energy tax to subsidize "green energy" technologies. The idea is to replace affordable nuclear and fossil energy sources with (far more expensive) renewal energy. Replacing cheap power with expensive power will raise energy costs even above the increase attributable to Obama's energy tax.

   Got it?

   Posted by comancheamerican at 03/19/2009 @ 11:10pm