This morning President Barack Obama gets to do what many Presidents have dreamed of doing: having a Q&A that (if it’s done correctly) excludes working, salaried journalists (a definition which in its usual sense excludes typical bloggers) and entails taking questions from more than people in a specific area — a Q&A that will literally be conducted by the White House with people online located all over the world.
The verdict will likely depend on whether the White House chooses a bunch of softball, puff pieces so it turns out to have been akin to one of George Bush’s campaign rallies where only the faithful could get in. Will he get some hardball questions or not? Obama has talked about transparency and dialogue: will this be real or one more example of a politician saying something that sounds nice but turns out to be a bunch of this?
You can participate by going to Open For Questions at this link and setting up an account. The official website says this:
We invite you to participate in our community-moderated online town hall. Submit your own question about the economy and vote on submissions from others. We also encourage you to include a link to a video of yourself asking your question (ideally 30 seconds or less), but text submissions are all you need. Come back on Thursday to watch the President answer some of the most popular submissions live at WhiteHouse.gov.
UPDATE: The online town hall will be at 11:30 AM Eastern, the voting will close at 9:30 AM.
92,918 people have submitted 104,112 questions and cast 3,607,373 votes.
Will you add yours?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.