Opinion: A disappointing crowdsourced Q&A with President Obama
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President Obama made himself available for questions from yet another segment of the public Wednesday: Twitter users. Alas, the crowdsourced questions at the #AskObama event generated no surprises and no new insights.
Maybe that’s an unrealistic expectation. Like many of his predecessors in the White House, Obama is a skilled politician who governs his tongue well. And because moderator (and Twitter co-founder) Jack Dorsey wasn’t permitted to follow up on the questions that Twitter selected out of the thousands submitted, Obama’s answers went all but unchallenged during the hour-long event. So the president stayed on comfortable ground, making the same points he’s been making for months about the economy and the federal budget.
The 18 questions put to Obama, which were picked in part because they reflected the #AskObama submissions as a whole, covered the stimulus package, jobs, taxes, energy policy, education, small businesses, real estate, collective bargaining rights, the debt ceiling and space exploration. There’s plenty of room to criticize Obama on all of those fronts, but only one question could be described as ‘tough.’ Submitted by the top Republican in the House, Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, it asked, ‘After embarking on a record spending binge that’s left us deeper in debt, where are the jobs?’
That’s a great question, but rather than trying to defend the Keynesian economic theory behind the 2009 stimulus package, Obama simply returned fire on Boehner. After conceding that job growth was too slow, Obama asked why Republicans weren’t supporting his call to revive the moribund construction industry by tackling some of the $2 trillion worth of highway, bridge and other infrastructure building projects that need to be done.
The exchange ended there. That’s the weakness of the ‘town hall’ format, in which no one pushes and prods the interviewee for a better answer.
To its credit, Twitter worked in several questions that were posted after the session began, and it had the president respond to several comments made about his answers. Most of these were supportive of Obama, though.
The best of the bunch came from a Twitter user identified only as Shnaps. After the president suggested that the government needed to put more pressure on banks to help borrowers who weren’t defaulting but whose homes were worth less than their mortgage debt, Shnaps asked, ‘Is free-market an option?’ Obama said that the market would determine the fate of most borrowers, but he added, ‘We ought to be able to make some progress on helping some people.’
A good interviewer would have asked then about the obvious and enormous moral-hazard problem caused when the government intervenes to rescue people who voluntarily make investments that don’t pan out. Should banks simply write off debt in proportion to the reduction in market value since the bubble burst? What does that tell future home buyers about who shoulders the risk for the price they agree to pay for a home?
But there was no one in that role Wednesday, just Dorsey reading the questions and responses picked by the Twitter team. I think it’s always a good thing to have the president answer questions about his view of the country and his administration’s policies. But based on the first go-around, the Twitter crowd is no match for one good interviewer.
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-- Jon Healey
