President Obama used his Twitter town hall event on Wednesday to cozy up to the middle class and push for a debt deal with Congress, while portraying Republicans as beholden to the interests of millionaires and billionaires. “The debt ceiling should not be something that is used as a gun against the heads of the American people to extract tax breaks for corporate jet owners or oil and gas companies that are making billions of dollars because the price of gasoline has gone up so high,” Obama told the 100 or so people gathered in the East Room. “I think the American people are on my side on this.”
After months of partisan sniping over federal spending, deficit reduction and whether to raise the nation’s debt limit, Obama said that if Republicans would agree to end tax breaks for the wealthy, “then we could solve our deficit problem.”
Republicans argue that raising taxes on the wealthy would shackle the country’s biggest spenders, and therefore slow economic growth — a point raised during the town hall event.
“You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts,” Obama fired back. “And the facts are that a modest increase for wealthy individuals is not shown to have [a serious impact] on job growth.”
Twitter was abuzz Wednesday with nearly 100,000 tweets using the hashtag “askObama” — the phrase the White House used to field questions for the event.
Obama spent roughly three to five minutes answering more than a dozen of the 140-character inquiries, which Twitter officials selected based on popularity.
The first selected tweet asked Obama to identify the mistakes he made in handling the recession.
Obama responded by ticking off a list of ways that he succeeded at his job — citing the stimulus package and the auto bailout — before admitting that he may not have done a stellar job explaining what he was doing to the public.
People “were not prepared for how long this [recovery] was going to take,” he said.
“Then there is the area of housing,” he added. “Of all the things we’ve done, that’s probably the area that has been most stubborn.”
The town hall setting gave Obama a comfortable amount of freedom, with no time limits for his answers and no pesky reporters asking follow-up questions.
There was one moment that may have caught Obama off-guard, however: A question tweeted by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
“After embarking on a record-breaking spending binge that left us deeper in debt, where are the jobs?” read Boehner’s tweet, which was displayed on a flat-screen television next to Obama.
A feisty Obama remarked, “Obviously John’s the speaker of the House, he’s a Republican, and so this is a slightly skewed question.”
Acknowledging that job growth has been too slow, Obama listed actions he has taken to help spur the economy — including extending tax breaks for the middle class — and he blamed Republicans in Congress for preventing him from doing more.
“We haven’t gotten the kind of cooperation that I’d like to see,” Obama said. “But I’m just going to keep on trying and eventually I’m hoping that the speaker will see the light.”
