Open for Questions Round 2: Response | Change.gov: The Obama-Biden Transition Team.During this second round, we decided to leave the voting open significantly longer, but even with that extra time we were surprised to see the final totals: 103,512 people submitted 76,031 questions and cast 4,713,083 votes. We can now be confident that the success of the first round was not just about a new trick, but just a hint of the willingness of the public to permanently change the way they interact with their government. There’s plenty of room to grow.

For this round we refined the process to make it more user-friendly, and broke out the questions into categories. We think this made for a more interesting experience, and ensured that a broader array of questions could get exposure. But we also wanted to try a new way of responding to the questions, so this time instead of text answers, we asked incoming White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to sit down with us. Since there were so many popular questions in so many categories, we tried to pull out some of them that had been addressed previously by the President-elect or Vice President-elect in order to focus the video portion on questions that haven’t been as specifically addressed during the Transition.

Oh, fantastic!  We were all so concerned when the #1 question in the first round of voting was from a citizen in Denton, Texas, who asked, “Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?” and you dismissed it with a curt eleven-word response:

President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

So this video response must be the chance you were waiting for to explain more fully your opposition to marijuana legalization, right?  After all, of the top five questions in the first round, ours was the only one to get a short dismissal with no explanation.  This time, legalization placed fourth overall and top in the National Security category.  At last, that Obama promise of transparency in government and responsiveness to the public is about to take root!  Let’s go to the video:

Hmm.  That’s interesting.  Oh, wait, right below the video is this part that says “Previously Addressed Questions” and shows some updates on the Patrick-Fitzgerald-as-Bush-Admin-Special-Prosecutor question, the Israel/Gaza question, and the Taxpayer-Wall-Street-Bailout-Accountability question.  OK, it looks like the answers to previously addressed questions will go here.

“Will you consider legalizing cannabis/marijuana/hemp so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a multi-billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?”—DJ C, Chicago, IL

Open for Questions Response, 12/15/08: “President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.”

Wow.  It’s condescending dismissal I can believe in.  Nothing like transparent and thoughtful responses to an issue that has now twice placed in the top five among the citizens who are responding online.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 9:11 pm and is filed under 4:20 NewsHour, Legalization, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.