OBAMA PUSHES AGENDA IN WEB FORUM

'Virtual' Town Hall a Spin on Favored Campaign Device

WASHINGTON--Bringing a high-tech twist to the familiar forum of the
town hall meeting, President Barack Obama on Thursday hosted a
"virtual" town hall in the East Room of the White House, answering
questions from attendees and from participants online.

The event, which was broadcast live by cable news networks, was the
latest in a series of aggressive steps Obama has taken recently in an
attempt to reach the public without relying on the traditional news
media--a tactic he employed with great success during his presidential
campaign.

To that end, Obama has picked his NCAA basketball tournament winners
on ESPN, traded jokes with Jay Leno and telephoned astronauts in space.

Half of the questions posed to the president were selected in a vote
by visitors to the White House Web site, who were asked to choose
among hundreds of thousands of suggested questions. About 3.6 million
votes were cast.

The voting aspect drove traffic to the Web site, where the president's
agenda could be read in detail. And because voters had to provide
their name and e-mail address, it allowed the administration to build
an e-mail list that could become a new tool to reach the public.

The town hall meeting is a favorite device for Obama's team. He
employed it during his campaign to combat critics who said he was too
aloof--and to dispel the notion that he was a larger-than-life media
creation.

At the time, Obama's objective was to persuade voters who were
skeptical of him as a potential president. Now it is to convince them
his policies will put the nation on the path to economic recovery.

In both cases, the methods have been similar: interact directly with
the public, in person and on the Web.

Former President Bill Clinton hosted an online chat in 1999, back when
people still used the term "World Wide Web." Among other new elements,
Obama allowed the public to choose which questions were most important.

In the 48 hours prior to the event, nearly 93,000 people submitted
104,092 questions. In the end, however, he answered only six questions
submitted online.

But when voters came, they stayed a while. The average visitor to the
Web site voted 30 to 45 times, the White House said.

Aaron Smith, a researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life
Project, found the level of interest among participants impressive.

"It matches up with our research on what people expect from the
administration," Smith said.

Some people in the demographic that Obama was trying to reach were
enthusiastic about the event.

"There's something transformative about this presidency when you see
this sort of online forum. The office will never be the same," J.C.
Lee, 26, said via the microblogging service Twitter. Lee is a
Berkeley, Calif., playwright and director of The Future Leaders
Institute in Oakland.

Others were less impressed.

"It's just another town hall," Ed Pastore, 40, of Alexandria, Va.,
wrote via Twitter. Pastore, founder of the Metagovernment project to
encourage participatory and "open-source government," watched the town
hall online and posted his reactions on Twitter.

While the town hall exchange was dominated by questions about health
care and job creation, another burning issue would not go away:
Questions about legalizing marijuana (there were 2,139 of them) were
among the most popular, Obama said.

"I don't know what this says about the online audience," he said,
smiling as the audience laughed.