Obama holds White House online townhall

President Obama briefly returned to the more relaxed days of the
campaign trail Thursday as he strolled around an East
Room podium while hosting the first White House online townhall
meeting.

The president joked with the live audience as he answered a dozen of the more than 92,000 questions submitted to the White House website on issues like healthcare, education, small-business tax policy and the automotive industry.

{mosads}A White House official said that at its peak, more than 67,000 people tuned in online to watch Obama field questions and, on a couple of occasions, continue his full-court press on getting his budget passed.

Flat-screens bearing the words “The White House is Open for Questions” greeted the group of small-business owners, nurses and teachers who made up the live audience. Jared Bernstein, Vice President Biden’s chief economist, moderated the event.

Obama paced around the podium with a hand-held microphone, laying out his policies and joking with the audience as he has in other townhalls since taking office.

On one question about job outsourcing, Obama warned that “not all of those jobs are going to come back.”

The president also warned that the country will have to be “patient and persistent” when it comes to job creation, because the recession is not over and the economy will continue to face “difficult times for the next several months, maybe through the end of the year.”

“I don’t think we’ve lost all the jobs we’re going to lose in this recession,” Obama said.

At this point, Bernstein noted that in the last recession, job loss continued to grow for another 19 months.

In a response to a question about the U.S. auto industry, Obama said he would be making some announcements in the coming days, joking that he didn’t “want to make all the news here today.”

But the president did say he is planning to provide more financial help to the embattled companies, depending on “their willingness to make some pretty drastic changes.”

Obama appeared to enjoy the event — or as he put it, the “experiment” — joking often with the audience, especially on one of the most popular topics that came up in the submitted questions: legalizing marijuana to fix the economy.

“I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” he joked before adding: “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy for growing our economy.”

All told, the White House said that more than 92,000 people submitted more than 104,000 questions and more than 3.6 million votes were cast to decide which were the most popular questions.