[420 Girl]

President Barack Obama’s first “online town hall” went down today in Washingt… er, rather, in cyberspace. It was, as the Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas put it, a little bit “like watching a press conference streamed via the Web. Which, these days, means most press conferences.” Still, the “Open for Questions” initiative yielded an impressive turnout: Americans submitted 104,064 questions and cast more than 3.5 million votes either in favour of or against those questions being included in the event. Very grassroots, you know.

Says Vargas:

Some worried that the administration would ask the questions it wanted to ask. Would questions be censored, deemed too inappropriate? So there was much relief when [moderator Jared] Bernstein started posing most voted-on questions to Obama. That in itself signaled the arrival of something new in our American political life circa 2009: a place for the crowd-sourcing, here-comes-everybody ethos of the Web to be a part of the governing dialogue. The president himself just proved it.

It is true that, generally speaking, Obama addressed the most popular questions in the various categories under which they were submitted—for example, about America’s “woefully inadequate” education system (6,153 votes in favour), about how he intends to help Americans “paying … mortgages, but living paycheck to paycheck” (3,661 votes in favour), and about unemployed veterans (1,797 votes in favour).

But hang on. What about these well-put queries?

“What are your plans for the failing ‘War on Drugs,’ that’s sucking money from tax payers and putting non-violent people in prison?” (7,487 votes in favour)

“Would you support the bill currently going through the California legislation to legalize and tax marijuana, boosting the economy and reducing drug cartel related violence?” (5,570 votes in favour)

“Why is marijuana still illegal? Cigarettes and alcohol are far more harmful, and with the taxes put on the legal distribution of marijuana the US could make millions.” (5,166 votes in favour)

“Has the administration given any thought to legalizing marijuana, as a cash crop to fuel the economy? Why not make available, regulate, and tax something that that about 10 million Americans use regularly and is less harmful than tobacco or alcohol?” (4,051 votes in favour)

None of these passed Bernstein’s lips, but the President did, to be fair, acknowledge them. Here’s what Captain Change had to say:

I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy—(laughter)—and job creation. And I don't know what this says about the online audience—(laughter)—but I just want—I don't want people to think that—this was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered. The answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy—(laughter)—to grow our economy. (Applause.)

In other words: get a job, ya bunch of hippies. He couldn’t really have sounded any more condescending unless he’d thanked contributors, complete with air quotes, for their “groovy” questions. I’m sure the audience would have lapped it up.

Now, admittedly, the President might well be right about what legalization would do for the economy. Imagine all the out-of-work drug enforcement workers, prison guards and support staff, the mass suicides from correctional industry lobbyists, and the tens of thousands of newly released inmates thrust into an already terrible job market. But that’s hardly the point he was trying to make. Rather, he was aiming for laughs. I think he'd have been considerably better off seriously addressing the War on Drugs—“a trillion dollars spent, two million people imprisoned, while over US$25-billion of illegal drugs enter the United States from Mexico each year, and are in more plentiful supply and at lower cost than when this so-called war began,” to quote Conrad Black on the subject, while “other countries, especially Mexico, are being torn to pieces”—or not addressing it at all.


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