WASHINGTON — The White House said more than 64,000 people watched President Obama answer questions on Thursday in the first live Internet video chat by an American president. But in declaring itself “Open for Questions,” on the economy, the White House learned it must be careful what it wishes for.

More than 100,000 questions were submitted, with the idea that Mr. Obama would answer those that were most popular. But after 3.6 million votes were cast, one of the top questions turned out to be a query on whether legalizing marijuana might stimulate the economy by allowing the government to regulate and tax the drug.

“I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Mr. Obama said, drawing a laugh from an audience gathered in the East Room, which included teachers, nurses and small-business people. “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.”

The marijuana question later took up a good chunk of the daily White House press briefing, where Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, suggested that advocates for legalizing marijuana had mounted a drive to rack up votes for the question.

Those advocates included Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which urged supporters to “let the president know that millions of American voters believe that the time has come to tax and regulate marijuana.”

But however the marijuana query rose to the top of the White House list, it provided one of the livelier moments in the mostly staid 70-minute event.

Mr. Obama did make a sliver of news, disclosing that he intended to announce in the next couple of days what kind of help his administration would give the auto industry. A senior White House official said no decision had yet been made; Mr. Gibbs hinted that the announcement would most likely occur on Monday.

“We will provide them some help,” Mr. Obama said, as he has in the past, while also talking tough, as he has done previously, by insisting that the auto makers would have to make “drastic changes” to restructure the way they do business.

Full article…

Obama Makes History in Live Internet Video Chat – NYTimes.com.

While women are increasingly reaching key positions in the world of European politics and business, they are still massively underrepresented and facing an uphill battle for recognition and equal pay.

“Still today in governments and parliaments, less than a quarter of members are women,” said Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish vice-president of the European Commission ahead of International Women’s Day on Sunday, March 8.

“There is no lack of female candidates,” she added. “The reality is men tend to choose men.”

“One half of the population is seriously underrepresented” and, this being the case, “the policy agenda will be set by men,” Wallstrom said during an EU parliamentary debate this week.

Deep-seated prejudices

Despite a rise in the number of women candidates, male politicians stand a better chance of getting elected due to deep-seated prejudices and habits, a study by the European Commission found.

According to data extrapolated from across the continent, an election with an equal number of male and female candidates would still result in a parliament with just 39 percent women representatives.

In other words, it would take 63 percent women candidates to achieve gender equilibrium in the final assembly.

“It’s wrong to blame women voters,” said Drude Dahlerup, a professor in the department of political science at Stockholm University. “The main problem is that male voters vote for male candidates.”

Read More..

Equal Rights Still Elusive for European Women | Europe | Deutsche Welle | 08.03.2009.

WASHINGTON: Not quite seven weeks into Barack Obama’s presidency, the capital’s leading thinkers seem to agree that the era of postpartisanship is over.

Obama’s team made little secret of their intention to win broad support for his stimulus plan – an effort that yielded three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House of Representatives. The president’s pick for the Commerce Department, Senator Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire, turned down the job, citing his personal opposition to the bill.

According to E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post, Obama himself, speaking to a group of columnists aboard Air Force One, suggested that, in the future, he would approach Republicans with more wariness. “You know, I am an eternal optimist,” the president said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.”

Such talk acted like a shot of adrenaline to the stilled hearts of liberal bloggers and columnists who had feared that Obama might squander a chance to stomp on his bewildered opposition. So much energy has been spent berating the idea of bipartisanship, in fact, that no one has stopped to ask what Obama means by it.

As the political scientist James Morone recently pointed out on The New York Times’s Op-Ed page, legislative bipartisanship, in the sense of two-party unity behind a single agenda, has never really existed.

The presidents we tend to immortalize hardly managed to transcend party politics; their greatness grew from their willingness to articulate arguments that were calibrated to be divisive. Franklin Roosevelt infuriated generations of conservatives who reviled his concept of expansive government. Ronald Reagan’s passionate counterargument made him an enduring enemy to the left.

This doesn’t mean, however, that our politics have not fundamentally changed over the last few decades. Roosevelt and his Republican critics had profound disagreements, but both sides understood that their dispute was ideological rather than personal, the clash of opposing theories in a common pursuit.

Read Complete Article Here…

Wary of Republicans, but not walking away – International Herald Tribune.

America’s New Shrink

Charles Ommanney / Getty Images for Newsweek

Therapist-in-Chief: The President explains the details of his $778 billion stimulus package to a crowd in Mesa, Arizona

If Ralph Waldo emerson had a 19th-century Facebook page, his “Favorite Quotation” (or maybe I should say my favorite Emerson quote) would likely be: “Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.”

For the last six months, events have been in the saddle of the world economy and they might ride us for quite a while. Every day seems to bring bad news, with more on the way. Will commercial real estate crash next? Is General Motors toast? Dow 5,000, anyone?

When President Obama was sworn in, the stock market dropped. When he signed the largest economic recovery package in American history last week, the Dow plunged nearly 300 points. His widely panned bank rescue plan and even his better-received housing rescue plan both laid eggs on the Street.

Obama says he doesn’t worry too much about short-term market swoons, and he’s right not to. Who elected greedy gamblers to represent us? But the market is now based less on assessments of specific companies than on reaction to the federal government. And that reaction, cascading down to Main Street, is a fair reflection of the nation’s pessimistic mood. The new president is popular and refreshing, but still well short of transformative. For all of the legislative achievements of his first month in office, Americans have not yet had their faith in the future restored.

What’s a president to do? If he starts in with the happy talk, he sounds like John McCain saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” which is what sealed the election for Obama in the first place. But if he gets too gloomy, he’ll scare the bejesus out of the entire world. The balance Obama strikes is to say that things will get worse before they get better, but that they will get better. Now he must convince us that’s true.

Conservatives smell blood. The Republican National Committee issued a press release saying Obama’s first month was all about “wasteful spending, failed bipartisanship and questionable ethics.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer called the $787 billion stimulus package “a legislative abomination,” and Karl Rove wrote that “the more Americans learn about the bill, the less they like it.”

Polls say otherwise. The public likes the signs of action, respects that the new president is willing to admit error and appreciates his constant reminders that there are no easy cures to what ails us.

Read full article…

Alter: Barack Obama, Bringer of Confidence | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com.