OBAMA CONNECTS FROM ON HIGH, ONLINE

His Latest High-Tech Interface With the Public Is a Town
Hall.

It started with the YouTube presidential debates, Saturday-morning
Internet addresses to the nation, and the Barack Obama Facebook page
and Twitter feed.

On Thursday, the president took another step in embracing the power of
technology -- hosting a virtual town hall that elicited more than
104,000 questions and drew 3.6 million votes to determine which the
president would answer.

In the end, given that the questions were vetted by the White House,
it felt about as spontaneous as an infomercial.

But that was not the point.

The voting aspect of the event -- an idea made popular by websites
such as Digg and Reddit -- drove hordes to the White House website,
fostering a connection with the public that presidents have long sought.

"People are sitting down and engaging," said Macon Phillips, Obama's
director of new media. "When you have that many people, think of the
distributive brainpower. People are coming together to
collaborate."

Andrew Rasiej, whose blog TechPresident.com monitors the intersection
of politics and the Web, added: "It's a baby step, but a significant
one nonetheless."

Beginning early in the presidential campaign, the Obama team showed a
willingness to test elements of new media, including online video,
e-mailing, social networking and micro-messaging (a la Twitter).

The technology, harnessed to turn out voters and spread Obama's
message, let grass-roots supporters engage daily.

But maintaining that participation in the White House has been
difficult. It's a problem that presidents have encountered before but
haven't been quite able to solve.

In March 1977, President Carter took 100 phone calls from across the
country. Event host Walter Cronkite called it "a new approach to
communication between the president and the people of the United States."

The calls were not screened in any way. Which led to such
less-than-scintillating exchanges as:

Caller: Good afternoon, Mr. President.

Carter: Good afternoon.

Caller: How are you?

Carter: Fine.

Nine million calls jammed CBS' switchboards.

Bill Clinton was the first president to venture online to engage the
public, conducting a 100-minute Internet chat in 1999. Despite
technical glitches, he managed to answer 19 questions from people all
over the world.

Obama's town hall Thursday borrowed a stratagem well-known to the
producers of "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars": To build an
audience, get people to participate -- even if only in a small way,
voting for favorites.

The White House used a question-and-answer platform called Google
Moderator, originally created by the Internet search giant so that its
more than 20,000 employees could vote on what to ask company founders
and executives.

"It's a fantastic way to get real-time input and have the crowd
prioritize the questions," said Vic Gundotra, a vice president of
engineering at Google. "But what do you do when the White House wants
to use it?"

What Obama had to say Thursday about the economy, education and
healthcare was nothing new. He has gone over his plans for the nation
several times since his inauguration.

Which may be why at 9 a.m. in the airy lobby of USC's Annenberg School
for Communication, a dozen students who were sprawled on armchairs or
sitting at tables barely seemed to take note. A wall was filled with
TV screens, but only one was showing Obama holding forth.

"They'll probably be playing it on repeat at CNN," said Susy Garcia
Salas, 26, a conference coordinator who recently graduated from the
communications school. "I might go look for the highlights online."

One question that seemed to get some traction was about legalizing
marijuana. (It was one of 2,139 such questions submitted.)

"I don't know what this says about the online audience," Obama said,
smiling as the crowd at the White House laughed.

"This was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was
answered. The answer is no, I don't think that's a good strategy to
grow our economy."

Blogger Rasiej said the administration's idea was "to try to create an
ecosystem of dialogue."

USC communications major Laurel West, 20, said: "I like that they're
trying to get people more involved with the process.

"But I'm not sure about its effectiveness."

She said she didn't have time to watch.

On Twitter, 26-year-old J.C. Lee -- a Berkeley playwright and Future
Leaders Institute director -- said: "There's something transformative
about this presidency when you see this sort of online forum.

"The office will never be the same."

But was the event truly engaging the public, or only creating an
illusion of doing so?

Sable Manson, 22, a USC graduate student who was hanging out at a
Starbucks near school, said she appreciated Obama's town hall as "a
sign of the times" but just wasn't sure everyone could participate in
government at an intimate level.

"Who's really going to be answering those 100,000 e-mails?" she said.
"It's headed in the right direction, but it's not perfect."