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.

--
NOTES:
Friday's Washington Times features this news article about Ask The President.

This post is originally from The Nation.

Follow The Nation's Ari Melber on Twitter.

Comments

[Wang111]

Speaking of Barack Obama: BARACK OBAMA IS AN EXCELLENT PRESIDENT!

Obama is a racial-minority individual and does not like racism:

I know it may be hard to believe.

However, it is absolutely true that Ronald Wilson Reagan committed horrible, racist, hate crimes during his presidency.

A lot of people know about Reagan's infamy.

And a lot of people will know about Reagan's infamy--even until the end of human existence: they'll find out.

Numbers 32:23: "Be sure your sins will find you out."

Respectfully Submitted by Andrew Yu-Jen Wang, J.D. Candidate
B.S., With the Highest Level of Academic Honors at Graduation, 1996
Messiah College, Grantham, PA
Lower Merion High School, Ardmore, PA, 1993

(I can type 90 words per minute, and there are thousands of copies on the Internet indicating the content of this post. And there are at least hundreds of copies in very many countries around the world.)
_________________
'If only it were possible to BAN invention that bottled up memories like scent so they never faded and never got stale.' (Once again, please consider an illustrative analogy: like scent that is held in or restrained or inhibited or suppressed or bottled up.) Off the top of my head—it came from my Lower Merion High School yearbook.

[clarryr]

Nice idea. The President is the best communicator of all the presidents so far.
He is the first to understand the internet and the first to have a blackberry.
I've heard he reads a few letters from citizens everyday. I think he would be
willing to answer a couple of internet questions every day (most days) too.
Of course he has people to manage it for him so he can dictate his response
so it could take only a few minutes time.
Having a process to filter down to the best, most pressing questions, is a great idea.

[Charmed]

The Press including huffingtonpost never skips a chance to bash him so if I was him I would continue to go to the people and skip the press. You guess will do a abc debate type of questions and then claim it's what the people want to hear. MSNBC didn't mention the stewart response to cramer to any of their shows even thou Scarbourgh spent the day before whipping cramer into a frenzy and egging him on. I don't trust the press and I would rather that President Obama continue to do town hall meetings and talk to the people and not give attention to the "Press.

[Sundialsvc4]

Does he actually have the time? And if so, is it time well spent? There are 305 million of us, and I can't even look at the 1,400 "spam" e-mails that I (thanks to Google, don't...) get every single day.

[rejoiceinit]

Give me a break--Obama cannot possibly respond to every single question and criticism that is constantly being hurled at him.

I am completely disappointed at the constant critique and criticism people are taking at our President instead of the the community activism that they need to take responsibilty for our own country.

This is not just about what President Obama is going to do for us--it's time we organize to figure out what we can do for ourselves --we shouldn't need to Ask the President as much as we need to Act--as president--in our own communities.

My question for Melber is how quickly will you pledge your participation--and stop waiting for the President to answer a question?

[Osmona]

Helloooooo and thank you very much.