Pubdate: Thu, 07 Jul 2011
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: Laura Meckler
Note: Jared A. Favole contributed to this article.

OBAMA TAKES TWITTER QUERIES

President Fields Public Questions On Issues Including Economy And Debt Ceiling

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama opened a White House "Twitter town hall" 
meeting by tweeting a question himself, becoming the first American 
president to issue one of the 140-character-maximum messages.

The event was a logical move for a White House that already blogs and 
shoots its own video, distributing the material through social media 
sites such as Facebook and Flickr and avoiding the filter of 
newspaper and TV reporters.

For just over an hour, the president answered questions submitted by 
the public through Twitter. The questions were selected by Twitter 
staff, who relied in part on an algorithm that measured which of 
thousands of proposed questions were most popular.

The event mixed familiar elements with new ones. It was carried live 
on cable networks, and one query asked of the president was submitted 
by a member of the old-school media, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

But it's not every day that the president takes a question in public 
posed by the leader of the opposition. Twitter chose a query from 
House Speaker John Boehner based on its popularity, officials said. 
"After embarking on a record spending binge that's left us deeper in 
debt, where are the jobs?" Mr. Boehner asked in a Twitter message, or tweet.

The president, who spoke his responses, took 3,044 characters (which 
would have required 22 tweets) to agree with Mr. Boehner that more 
jobs were needed and to pitch his ideas for new tax breaks and 
infrastructure investment.

In the spirit of Twitter, which limits the length of messages, Mr. 
Obama seemed to make an effort to shorten his traditionally long 
responses. At a Facebook town hall meeting in April, his spoken 
responses, if translated into Twitter messages, would have averaged 
38 tweets. On Tuesday, it was just under 14. A White House 
communications staffer summarized his spoken answers into written tweets.

Before the town hall, people with varied interests attempted to push 
their priorities to the top of the heap by posting multiple tweets on 
the same topic, among them diabetes, marijuana legalization and 
queries like Mr. Boehner's, suggesting that the president had failed 
to create jobs. Twitter said it chose the questions based partly on 
popularity, as measured by the number of times a question was 
re-tweeted or replied to.

The questions included issues out of the news, such as tax breaks for 
companies that hire veterans, and in the news, such as debt 
negotiations. One user asked if Mr. Obama would raise the nation's 
legal borrowing limit by issuing an executive order, rather than 
waiting for Congress to resolve a deadlock and pass legislation. The 
writer referred to an interpretation of the 14th amendment that some 
say gives him such authority.

Mr. Obama's answer ran to more than 2,000 characters, or about 15 
tweets. But he sidestepped the question, saying that Congress should 
act and make any executive action unnecessary.

- - Jared A. Favole contributed to this article. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D