With Congress away on recess, President Barack Obama is stepping up his sales pitch for health care reform, tapping online social media in a new end run around the traditional news filter.
At a town hall today in Annandale, Obama will answer questions from a live audience, and also from users of popular online communities including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
“The president wanted to continue the conversation that we started last week with town halls,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. It’s “a continuing conversation about how to move health care reform forward.”
Although the format opens up the opportunity for questioning Obama to a potentially limitless online audience, the White House controls which questions are asked.
The White House in April staged its first such “virtual” town hall on the economy and invited Internet users to post questions and vote on which ones the president should answer.
One of the leading topics chosen by participants was whether the United States should legalize marijuana as a way to curb drug violence in Mexico.
Obama laughed it off at the time, but the online voting feature is not part of the setup for Annandale. “This online town hall will be a little different than the last one,” the administration told users on its WhiteHouse.gov Web site post announcing the forum.
On Tuesday, the White House Web site was directing visitors to its Facebook profile, which featured a streaming video discussion of health care by administration officials accompanied by live comments from Facebook users.
“How can highly qualified and energetic citizens with great potential to help the administration in this area get a job to help you in the administration with this?” was one question. Others debated the president’s response to a coup in Honduras.
The administration has made a priority of tapping new media to help push its policy agenda. It’s a gambit in keeping with the president’s wired, BlackBerry-generation image that also generates more attention for what would otherwise be a routine town hall event in a Washington suburb.
The July 4 recess left few Republicans in town to go on cable television and issue rebuttals to the administration’s health care public relations efforts.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele told Fox News that Obama lacks a clear health care mandate.
“This is a train that the president and Democrats want to push out of the station very quickly,” Steele said. “And while there may be some 56 percent to 61 percent of the American people still supporting the president personally, they are increasingly more hesitant with the spending and certainly the direction the administration wants to go on health care.”
Rep. Gerald Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who represents the area where Obama will hold his town hall Wednesday, told reporters on a conference call that “there is no question most Americans recognize there is a crisis in health care.”
Obama’s health care push precedes his departure Sunday on an overseas trip to Rome, Moscow and Ghana.
