WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama seized the bully pulpit Thursday and reprised the best of his acclaimed campaign skills in an unprecedented Internet town hall from the White House — a direct sales pitch for Americans to get behind his $3.6 trillion budget and be patient as he tries to right the tottering economy.
After an opening statement and declaring, “This isn’t about me; it’s about you,” Obama took up a microphone and strolled the ornate East Room, playing to an audience of 100 invited guests. The White House estimated that 67,000 people were watching him in cyberspace.
Obama said he had called the first-of-its-kind online town-hall meeting as an “an important step” toward creating a broader avenue for information about his administration. Spokesman Robert Gibbs said there would be more such events.
The Internet questioning dovetailed with the president’s key projects: universal health care, improved education, energy independence and the range of promises made in his campaign for the White House.
Obama drew on his own experiences with the American health care system to empathize with one questioner who supported his goal of universal coverage. He threw bouquets of praise to nurses who helped the family when his daughter Sasha was stricken with meningitis and returned with vigor to a recounting of the experience of watching his fatally ill mother argue with an insurance company to pay what it owed her for ovarian cancer treatment.
In a lighter moment, Obama noted there had been heavy support for a question about legalizing marijuana as a means of boosting the economy and creating jobs.”The answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy,” he quipped.
The president did not make news but ran smoothly through answers to questions posed to him on the White House website and chosen according to rankings by respondents. A moderator read Obama some of the questions, and other questions were displayed on monitors in the room.
And with more than 100,000 questions submitted for the forum, it gave the administration a significant number of e-mail addresses for future outreach and the next campaign.
The economy dominated, allowing Obama to sell his agenda for putting the country on a sounder footing in the midst of the worst economic downturn in decades and a financial crisis unmatched since the 1930s.
One questioner asked why the U.S. did not adopt a European-style government-sponsored health care system. Because, Obama said, he believed the best way forward was to build on the current system that relies heavily on employer plans rather than scrap what has existed for generations and largely has met the need of a majority of Americans.
