Pompo

Pot takes center stage at townhall
3/26/09|Politico| by Josh Gerstein

The White House’s high-profile foray into cyberspace with a presidential town hall meeting Thursday illustrated both the perils and the promise of relegating democracy to the Internet.

More than 92,000 people submitted questions for President Obama through the White House Web site, according to a tally posted online. And about 3.6 million votes were cast for and against those queries. How many people created multiple identities to stuff the ballot boxes is impossible to know.

Despite the economy’s frightening plunge, the issue which proved to be the most urgent priority of the online audience was legalizing marijuana. Questions on the issue dominated the top slots in a variety of categories set up by the White House, such as energy, jobs, and health care. Under the heading of “budget,” seven of the ten queries voted most popular were about legalizing drugs, and many were about taxing them.

“There was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high: that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation,” Obama said, with a chuckle. “I don’t know what this says about the online audience.”

“This was a fairly popular question — we want to make sure it was answered. The answer is no. I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy,” he said to laughter and applause from the live East Room audience of union members, teachers, business leaders and others.

Most of the drug questions posted on the site, while rarely asked at the White House, were far from bizarre. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government would defer to state governments whether to allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes. And just Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, traveling in Mexico, questioned U.S. drug policies and said America’s huge appetite for narcotics was fueling the staggering violence south of the border.

While Obama’s answer was unequivocal, it was also dismissive and didn’t explain why legalization was unwise.

It seems part of the popularity of marijuana questions was fueled by NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which urged people to vote for questions supporting the legalization of cannabis in a posting on its Web site.

“Rather than rebuff the public’s calls for taxing and regulating marijuana like alcohol, the new administration ought to be embracing it,” Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of NORML, said in an e-mail. “According to two recent polls — one by Zogby and a separate California field poll — a majority of west coast voters support regulating cannabis like alcohol. This is not a ‘laughing’ matter.”



The promise of the web-oriented event for the White House was a substantive discussion on education, jobs, and the economic crisis, with no queries about the procedural debates and political undercurrents that often obsess the Washington press corps.

Despite the Internet-generated hype — the White House billed it as “the first-ever on-line town hall from the White House,” offering participants “a direct line to the administration” — Obama took just six questions from those submitted on-line over the course of an hour. He then fielded an equal number from the invited audience.

The first cyber question was about the importance of education, and the second was a more pointed one about how the administration was helping homeowners who are struggling but not presently in foreclosure during a session that totaled about an hour.

In response, Obama signaled that he understood the urgency of strapped homeowners and the powerful populist sentiment that those who played by the rules aren’t benefitting from the various bailouts.

“There are a whole bunch of folks out there that are not about to walk away from their home but are getting killed right now because their home values have dropped drastically. They’re still making payments but they’re in trouble,” the president said.

As he continued his answer, however, Obama sounded a bit like an infomercial pitchman urging viewers to “call now” to refinance their mortgages.

“You have the potential to cut your monthly payments, but you’ve got to take advantage of it. And if you need more information you can go on our website, at Whitehouse.gov, or you can contact your local bank and find out whether you qualify,” Obama told viewers.

The generally deferential questions and the lack of follow-ups combined to diminish the chance that Obama would commit news. His answer to a common question -- why universal health care is provided in Europe but not in America -- was interesting more for what he omitted than what he said.

“I think we can accomplish it. Whether we do it exactly the way European countries do it or Canada does is a different question. There are a variety of ways to get to universal coverage,” Obama said. He signaled that he opposed the single-payer approach because it would be too revolutionary for the American employer-based system.

“It may not be the best system if we were designing it from scratch, but that’s what everybody’s accustomed to,” he said.

In response to a video question from three college women at Kent State in Ohio, Obama offered his most forceful argument yet in favor of ending the tradition role of banks and some other financial firms in offering federally-backed student loans. The proposal, contained in the president’s recent budget plan, has met with resistance from Republicans and some powerful Democrats.

“The banks make several billion dollars worth of profits off managing these student loans, which would be okay except for the fact that these loans are guaranteed by the federal government,” the president explained. “They can make profits on other things, but let’s not have them make profits on this. Let’s take those billions of dollars, and then that either allows us to either lower student loan rates or expand grants.”

In response to an in-person question on charter schools, Obama offered talk that irks teachers’ unions: the idea that many public schools have some bad teachers who should be fired.

“Some people just aren’t meant to be teachers, just like some people aren’t meant to be carpenters, some people aren’t meant to be nurses,” he said. “It can’t be impossible to move out bad teachers…that makes everybody depressed in a school.”

White House aides said 64,000 people watched the event online: a decent audience, but a tiny fraction of those who are likely to have seen the event on daytime cable television. Those numbers, in turn, are dwarfed by the more than 40 million who tuned in to his prime-time news conference Tuesday night.

The moderator for the town hall, vice presidential economic aide Jared Bernstein, sat on a stool at the side of the room, like a sidekick on a television talk show. He had a music stand with notes on it, but, alas, no band.

Obama made clear that despite his campaign's tech savvy, the online forum was still a work in progress. It’s an “experiment that we’re trying out,” he said.

[News Admin. note : There's a couple of videos available to view of the meeting at the Politico website.]