Dad pants be damned because President Obama’s working to get his groove back with voters today as he will be participating in a live Google+ Hangout on YouTube this afternoon. The President will be answering questions (over 133,000 were submitted but don’t expect Obama to answer all of them – get real, he’s got a world to run) submitted by YouTubers over the past week since the State of the Union. While people have been able to submit and vote for questions that have been posed, a select few whose questions were accepted will be invited to participate in the live Hangout with the President.
The Hangout will be streaming live today at 2:30PM on the White House YouTube Channel and while it’s too late at this point to submit a question, you can head on over to the page now and get a preview of some of the questions that have received votes thus far. Interestingly, of the ten questions that appear on the top of the page, eight of them are focused on the (de)criminalization of marijuana. I wish I could say it’d be exciting to see the President answer any of those questions candidly – YouTube notes that Obama and the White House will not have access to the questions asked prior to the interview – but even a question about something as divisive as marijuana legalization will still stubbornly illicit a canned response. Obama and his team have been at this whole politics things for a while and you don’t go charging into a less moderated medium like YouTube without having all of your ducks in a row beforehand. Additionally, I expect several of the topics will be drawn from the SOTU last week, such as college tuition and the snail-paced job growth. Who knows, though, with the President’s penchant for being able to seamlessly combine stately professionalism with refreshingly human animation, he’ll likely have more than a couple of entertaining responses.
Anyways. If you’ve got an hour to kill and want to cram before the POTUS has his Hangout+ session, re-watch parts (or all) of last week’s State of the Union address. If you do watch it, I recommend not partaking in the drinking game that many like to enjoy while watching the SOTU – it’s still a bit early in the day for that.