OBAMA TAKES TWITTER QUERIES

President Fields Public Questions On Issues Including Economy And Debt Ceiling

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama opened a White House "Twitter town hall"
meeting by tweeting a question himself, becoming the first American
president to issue one of the 140-character-maximum messages.

The event was a logical move for a White House that already blogs and
shoots its own video, distributing the material through social media
sites such as Facebook and Flickr and avoiding the filter of
newspaper and TV reporters.

For just over an hour, the president answered questions submitted by
the public through Twitter. The questions were selected by Twitter
staff, who relied in part on an algorithm that measured which of
thousands of proposed questions were most popular.

The event mixed familiar elements with new ones. It was carried live
on cable networks, and one query asked of the president was submitted
by a member of the old-school media, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

But it's not every day that the president takes a question in public
posed by the leader of the opposition. Twitter chose a query from
House Speaker John Boehner based on its popularity, officials said.
"After embarking on a record spending binge that's left us deeper in
debt, where are the jobs?" Mr. Boehner asked in a Twitter message, or tweet.

The president, who spoke his responses, took 3,044 characters (which
would have required 22 tweets) to agree with Mr. Boehner that more
jobs were needed and to pitch his ideas for new tax breaks and
infrastructure investment.

In the spirit of Twitter, which limits the length of messages, Mr.
Obama seemed to make an effort to shorten his traditionally long
responses. At a Facebook town hall meeting in April, his spoken
responses, if translated into Twitter messages, would have averaged
38 tweets. On Tuesday, it was just under 14. A White House
communications staffer summarized his spoken answers into written tweets.

Before the town hall, people with varied interests attempted to push
their priorities to the top of the heap by posting multiple tweets on
the same topic, among them diabetes, marijuana legalization and
queries like Mr. Boehner's, suggesting that the president had failed
to create jobs. Twitter said it chose the questions based partly on
popularity, as measured by the number of times a question was
re-tweeted or replied to.

The questions included issues out of the news, such as tax breaks for
companies that hire veterans, and in the news, such as debt
negotiations. One user asked if Mr. Obama would raise the nation's
legal borrowing limit by issuing an executive order, rather than
waiting for Congress to resolve a deadlock and pass legislation. The
writer referred to an interpretation of the 14th amendment that some
say gives him such authority.

Mr. Obama's answer ran to more than 2,000 characters, or about 15
tweets. But he sidestepped the question, saying that Congress should
act and make any executive action unnecessary.

- - Jared A. Favole contributed to this article.