Denuo - denuology.com

President Obama yesterday held a fairly remarkable town-hall style meeting yesterday called Open for Questions. Anyone could go to the site and either suggest a question and/or vote on which questions the president should answer. For the debates that took place during the election, it seemed fairly random which questions were selected for answering. But this time around, it appears the president really did tackle those with the most votes, submitting to the will of the people. That likely seemed like a problem-free strategy until the administration realized that the top question across a third of the categories was about legalizing marijuana.

Asking Obama if he would make pot legal was the single most popular question in the categories of Financial Stability, Jobs, Budget and Green Jobs/Energy (?) and was the second most popular in Health Care Reform. Actually, the top seven most popular questions about the Budget were about cannabis. Something tells me if CNN went out an surveyed 1000 randomly-selected adult Americans the issue wouldn’t do quite as well. So what happened? The White House got bumrushed Facebook- style. Just like the well-known incidents with sites like Digg and , people organized quickly and forced the administration to respond.

Except nothing guaranteed Obama had to respond. Certainly the last administration was more than comfortable burying information they didn’t want to share and ignoring questions they didn’t care to address. And government in general has wielded executive privilege and hid as long as possible until an issue either went away or became unavoidable (any Clinton examples come to mind?). So while the president is getting a lot of flack for his quick dismissal of the issue, in my mind he still deserves credit for addressing it. Whether or not the question reflected a true priority amongst a wide audience, it was still included in yesterday’s session. If people disagree with his response, at least the debate can continue. And for those unhappy to see the issue dominate the top of the online charts, it serves notice that it’s time to organize better and stronger than what appears to be the strongest lobby on the Internets.