The White House is Open for Questions, Even From Stoners

Today the President held his first "Open for Questions" event in the East Room of the White House. Basically the White House invited people to submit questions for POTUS online. People could then vote for the questions they'd most like to hear him answer. The whole event streamed live on whitehouse.gov, and around 100 regular folks where invited to the East Room to watch. Over 90,000 people submitted questions and 3.6 million votes were cast. So, you could say it was a pretty successful merger of Campaign Obama and White House Obama.

Most questions weren't particularly surprising. Americans are duly concerned about education, health-care, veterans and the economy, and the President talked at length about these topics. But amid the collapse of the global financial system, raging populism and a near-crisis in health-care, it seems that one group of Americans has mobilized to ask POTUS the tough questions: Stoners. Yep, that's right, in a rare display of motivated activism, stoners managed to make one of a question about marijuana legalization one of the most popular. POTUS, who is not entirely unfamiliar with the topic, had this to say:

"I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy -- (laughter) -- and job creation.  And I don't know what this says about the online audience -- (laughter) -- but I just want -- I don't want people to think that -- this was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered.  The answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy -- (laughter) -- to grow our economy.  (Applause.)"

Dude. Bummer.

(And just to pre-empt all those people about to write me and say that it is a fair issue - yes, there are people legitimately interested in the potential economic and health benefits of weed, but c'mon! We all know most of the voters were college kids in pyjamas.)