• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • 2
    CommentGo Back
Download
 
The White HouseOffice of the Press Secretary, For Immediate Release, July 06, 2011
President Barack Obama Q&A in FirstTwitter Town Hall Meeting
East Room
2:04 P.M. EDT
 
MR. DORSEY:
 
Good afternoon and welcome to the White House.
 
I am Jack Dorsey, fromTwitter.
 
Through more than 200 million tweets per day, people around the world use Twitter toinstantly connect to what's most meaningful to them.
 
In every country -- Egypt and Japan, theUK and the United States -- much of this conversation is made up of everyday people engagingin spirited debate about the future of their countries.
www.Zimvi.com
 
 
Our partners at Salesforce Radian6 studied more than a million tweets, discussing ournation's politics over the recent weeks, and they found that America's financial security to be oneof the most actively talked about topics on Twitter.
 
They further found that President Obama'sname comes up in more than half of these conversations.And so today this vibrant discussion comes here to the White House and you get to ask thequestions.
 
To participate, just open your web browser and go to askObama.Twitter.com.
 
Neitherthe President or I know the questions that will be asked today.
 
That decision is driven entirely bythe Twitter users.
 
And so let's get the conversation started.
 
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the UnitedStates.
 
(Applause.)
 
THE PRESIDENT:
 
Hello, everybody!
 
(Applause.)
 
First of all, everybody can sit down.
 
(Laughter.)
 
It's much easier to tweet from a seated position.
 
(Laughter.)MR. DORSEY:
 
And I understand you want to start the conversation off with a tweeteryourself.
 
THE PRESIDENT:
 
I'm going to make history here as the first President to live tweet.
 
Sowe've got a computer over here.
 
(Types in tweet.)
 
MR. DORSEY:
 
It's only 140 characters.
 
(Laughter.)THE PRESIDENT:
 
All right, I think I have done this properly.
 
But here's the test.MR. DORSEY:
 
And you tweeted.
 
THE PRESIDENT:
 
How about that?
 
Not bad.
 
(Applause.)
 
Thank you.
 
So I think myquestion will be coming up at some point.
 
MR. DORSEY:
 
So what was your question?
 
Here it is.
 
THE PRESIDENT:
 
Here's the question:
 
"In order to reduce the deficit, what costs wouldyou cut and what investments would you keep?"And the reason I thought this was an important question is, as all of you know, we are goingthrough a spirited debate here in Washington, but it's important to get the whole countryinvolved, in making a determination about what are the programs that can help us grow, cancreate jobs, improve our education system, maintain our clean air and clean water, and what arethose things that are a waste that we shouldn’t be investing in because they're not helping us
www.Zimvi.com
 
grow or create jobs or creating new businesses.
 
And that debate is going to be heating up overthe next couple of weeks, so I'd love to hear from the American people, see what thoughts theyhave.MR. DORSEY:
 
Excellent.
 
Well, first question comes from a curator in New Hampshire.
 
And we have eight curators around the country helping us pick tweets from the crowd so that wecan read them to the President.And this one comes from William Smith:
 
"What mistakes have you made in handling thisrecession and what would you do differently?"
 
THE PRESIDENT:
 
That's a terrific question.
 
When I first came into office we were facingthe worst recession since the Great Depression.
 
So, looking around this room, it's a pretty youngroom -- it's certainly the worst recession that we've faced in our lifetimes.
 
And we had to actquickly and make some bold and sometimes difficult decisions.
 
It was absolutely the right thing to do to put forward a Recovery Act that cut taxes formiddle-class folks so they had more money in their pocket to get through the recession.
 
It wasthe right thing to do to provide assistance to states to make sure that they didn’t have to lay off teachers and cops and firefighters as quickly as they needed to.
 
And it was the right thing to doto try to rebuild our infrastructure and put people back to work building roads and bridges and soforth.
 
It also was the right thing to do, although a tough decision, to save the auto industry, whichis now profitable and gaining market share -- the U.S. auto industry -- for the first time in a verylong time.
 
I think that -- probably two things that I would do differently.
 
One would have been toexplain to the American people that it was going to take a while for us to get out of this.
 
I thinkeven I did not realize the magnitude, because most economists didn’t realize the magnitude, of the recession until fairly far into it, maybe two or three months into my presidency where westarted realizing that we had lost 4 million jobs before I was even sworn in.And so I think people may not have been prepared for how long this was going to take andwhy we were going to have to make some very difficult decisions and choices.
 
And I takeresponsibility for that, because setting people’s expectations is part of how you end up being ableto respond well.
 
The other area is in the area of housing.
 
I think that the continuing decline in the housingmarket is something that hasn’t bottomed out as quickly as we expected.
 
And so that’s continuedto be a big drag on the economy.
www.Zimvi.com
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
Phantomimic

It's great that questions from the twitterverse were relayed this way to the president, this is true democracy in action.

reply07 / 08 / 2011
LauraNovak

Good to see a combination of "players" asking him questions as well as regular folk. So cool to see him embrace this technology!

reply07 / 08 / 2011
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...