Obama's First Twitter Town Hall Focuses On Jobs
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Pres. Obama with Twitter Co-founder at Twitter Town Hall, (screen shot of live event at askobama.twitter.com)
Making history as the first president to send a live tweet from the East Room, Obama sat down with Twitter co-founder and executive chairman, Jack Dorsey, who moderated the event, along with 140 Twitter users in the audience who follow the White House’s official account and were selected to attend.
Using the hashtag #AskObama, the White House received more than 60,000 questions or comments about the president’s Twitter Town Hall, according to a White House press release.
With about 27 percent of questions to Obama in the jobs category, according to Dorsey, one Twitter user from Boston asked why job creation often centered around manufacturing when the technology and knowledge industries are thriving. “Why not be realistic about jobs?” read the tweet from user @dmscott.
Obama said manufacturing jobs tend to support other jobs because they are interdependent, and “they end up having a substantial impact on the overall economy.”
The president said he would like to invest in research and development that would combine technology and production with a domestic workforce.
“It’s great that we have an Apple that’s creating iPods, iPads and designing them and creating the software, but it would be nice if we’re also making the iPads and the iPods here in the United States, because that's some more jobs that people can work at,” Obama said.
In addition to creating jobs that embrace both technology and manufacturing, Obama said the nation would benefit from a workforce who is better trained in math, science and technology.
The national unemployment rate is 9.1 percent as of May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Speaker of the House, John Boehner, also had a job-related question for Obama. “After embarking on a record spending binge that left us deeper in debt, where are the jobs?”
Obama pointed to some progress in job creation despite the 4 million jobs that he said were lost due to the recession by the time he was sworn into office.
“What he’s right about is that we have not seen fast enough job growth relative to the need.” Obama added, “Over the last 15 months, we’ve actually seen two million jobs created in the private sector.”
Another New Hampshire user asked how Obama could have handled the recession differently.
Saying both he and economists did not realize the magnitude of the recession until the country was already deeply immersed, Obama said he could have better communicated that it would take a while for the country to recover from the recession.
The event was a direct approach to communicating with the public without a news organization as the intermediary.
“We’ve entered a different information age, where people get news and information in a different way than they did in the past,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer told reporters Tuesday in a conference call.
“If you’re going to communicate with the broad public, it is no longer sufficient to simply do it through traditional mainstream media,” Pfeiffer said.
Twitter has an estimated 2 million users.
The social media website partnered with a content-filtering company and eight seasoned Twitter users to select questions that came from around the country and covered diverse subjects. Thw White House said neither Obama nor Dorsey knew which questions would be asked prior to the question-and-answer session.
Watch the event here.
