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Obama Ducks Call To More Question And Answer Time

Neon Tommy Staff |
February 3, 2010 | 7:15 p.m. PST

The White House shot down a joint liberal-conservative
call for regular open mic sessions with Congress.
(Creative Commons licensed)

Rebuffing a left-right alliance of prominent bloggers, journalists and political consultants, the Obama White House is balking on a call to make presidential question and answer sessions with Congress a regular event.

Hundreds of bloggers stretching from David Corn and Jane Hamsher on the progressive left to conservative voices like Instapundit Glenn Reynolds have launched a web petition campaign to institutionalize the televised give-and-take sessions President Obama held with Republican House members last Friday and Democratic Senators on Wednesday.

"America could use more of this -- an unfettered and public airing of political differences by our elected representatives. So we call on President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner to hold these sessions regularly -- and allow them to be broadcast and webcast live and without commercial interruption, sponsorship or intermediaries," reads a statement on the petition website www.demandquestiontime.com .

As soon as the site was launched Wednesday morning, thousands signed onto the web campaign and the topic became a leading trend on Twitter with the hashtag #QuestionTime.

The White House reception to the idea was cool, to say the least. Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton tried to stamp out the cyber-firestorm, saying that Obama's top political advisor was turning thumbs down.

"David Axelrod has talked about this a little," Burton said. "And what he had to say is: part of the reason Friday was so successful with the GOP conference was the spontaneity that occurred there. And it is going to be hard to recreate the spontaneity that happened."

Last Friday, Obama rocked the political scene when he spent nearly two hours in an open mic free-for-all with House Republicans. His session this week with Senate Democrats was less spirited but just as fascinating to political cognoscenti as well as to ordinary viewers and voters.

Blogger and journalist Corn, the bureau chief of the liberal Mother Jones magazine explains how the idea for the campaign came together:

As I was tweeting during the Obama-GOP Q&A, Micah Sifry, a co-founder of TechPresident.com, a cross-partisan group blog covering the intersection of politics, governance and technology, sent me a direct message on Twitter: "you write the language for an online petition for institutionalizing #questiontime and we'll push it out." I'm a journalist, not an activist, but I thought starting a crusade for better political debate could be worthwhile. The next day, I sent Sifry a draft.

By this point, Sifry had enlisted Ari Melber, a Nation magazine writer who covers the Netroots, and Michael Moffo, who was director of special projects for the Obama campaign and who now works for the SS&K communications firm. All four of us realized at the start that this effort would not fly if it had only one wing. The point was not to set up more sessions that Obama could exploit to his advantage. The aim was to enhance political conversation. Sifry immediately reached out to conservative bloggers and Republican techies, and he recruited Glenn Reynolds, Jon Henke and Mindy Finn. Our group quickly expanded to include others, including Internet consultant Clay Shirky, liberal writer Todd Gitlin, George W. Bush campaign consultant Mark McKinnon, Wonkette.com founder Ana Marie Cox, conservative strategist Grover Norquist, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, conservative blogger Ed Morrissey, Craigslist creator Craig Newmark, Internet guru Esther Dyson, former Obama economic adviser Susan Crawford, MoveOn's Eli Pariser, former President George H.W. Bush aide James Pinkerton, GOP strategist Leslie Sanchez, Personal Democracy Forum founder Andrew Rasiej, Democratic consultant Joe Trippi, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Media Research Center founder L. Brent Bozell III, and others.

With Obama's poll numbers hovering near 50 percent and with populist unrest simmering to both his right and left, it isn't clear yet whether the White House can hold out against this cross-ideological call for more open debate. It will be a crucial test of the power of Web politics to see if enough clout can be brought to bear to force a reversal by Obama.



 

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