On Thursday, the 44th president became the first commander in chief to respond to questions on Twitter, answering tweeted questions about the administration’s so called Congressional to-do list.
The White House only gave 40 minutes’ notice — in a tweet signed by the president with the initials “b.o.” — that Obama would take tweeted questions. While the White House announced earlier announced that they would answer questions, they were coy about who would answer. Obama is in Iowa, and answered the questions between a visit to a Newton, Iowa, wind turbine manufacturer and a campaign event in Des Moines.
The personal Twitter chat lasted about 21 minutes, during which Obama answered seven questions centered around his energy policy, small business tax credits and “pushing big banks to do the right thing.” It took Obama more than 140 characters to answer a few of them, so he broke the answers into multiple tweets.
To prove that Obama was actually answering questions himself, White House photographer Pete Souza tweeted a photo of the president typing away on a MacBook Pro while Macon Phillips, the White House director of digital strategy, sat next to him.
This was a much less ballyhooed session than the super-hyped and staged White House Twitter Town Hall Meeting that took place about a year ago in Washington.
Why such short notice before the tweeting commenced? It might have to do with a persistent problem has been spam associated with popular Twitter hashtags — no doubt a problem for the president’s Twitter chat Thursday as well. Spam tweets, many of a pornographic nature, took over the #WHChat hashtag in the past.
Also interesting is the fact that Obama was tweeting from the White House account, @WhiteHouse, instead of his campaign account, @Barac
kObama, because officials said that this was not an official campaign event, but the president acting in official capacity.
Check out the interesting Twitter exchanges between the president and the electorate on mashable.com:
— terry shropshire
