Obama GOP Q&A
 

The following is the video of Obama's GOP Q&A last Friday. I did not watch all of it, but he seemed to do very well and was very consistent with his State of the Union address. But, as with the State of the Union address, he rarely admitted he was wrong and backed up his policies with "the leading [whoever] all agreed with my policy", which I don't know if it is true or not. Also, I have not seen any rebuttals so I don't know where he exaggerated or left something big out of his arguments.

But overall, this does show that Obama is, at least publically, trying to bring Democrats and Republicans closer together and this is an obvious step in the right direction. One very large issue that can be seen is that Republicans feel they are not being heard from either Obama not crediting their input that has been used or Pelosi ignoring Republican ideas.

Keep in mind, this is an hour and seven minutes long.

"President's Question Time". I wish this was a mandatory regular occurance. But since Republicans have said it was a mistake to allow cameras, I won't get my hopes up.

That's the problem. With cameras there will be nothing but sugar coated answers. Without cameras, we have no idea what the fuck is going on.

Either way "We the people" lose.

Gonna have to crack a cold one tomorrow and watch that.

Maybe if it became an institution, but it doesn't appear to have worked like that this time. The Republicans appear to have tried to ask tough questions, and Obama flat-out called some of them liars (in the nicest possible way). This seems to me to be the least sugar-coated face-to-face exchange I've seen in American politics.

If their had been a regular "Presidents Question Time' like process then it's probaby unlikely the previous encumbant would have run for office, which IMHO would have been a good thing.

This kind of exchange is well over due. Too bad he really never did admit where he lied or mislead the public in an effort to win support for the programs his party advanced. We need more of this kind of exchange. I don't recall any president in the past having a public meeting with the opposit party in this great of a number. It is a good start. I agree with Beest also, Bush could never have survived an exchange of this level.

What lies?

Millions of shovel ready jobs for one.

Transparency for another.

The number of jobs created by the stimulus money.

The BS they told us about the Health Care Bill and that he intended to negotiate health care reform publicly .

Once a bill was passed by Congress, the White House would post it online for five days before he signed it.