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Comment by FlukeATX | Hacker News Reader

Just want to chime in, it looks like Obama is heading out[1] after answering only ten questions. I think it's fair to call that disappointing when the thread had more than 12,000 comments.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obam...

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Is it? It appears that his AMA was online for maybe 45 minutes. How long should we expect the President of the United States to stay on the site for? Presumably has has other things to do.

He answered questions on these topics:

  1. Space Race
  2. Internet Freedom
  3. Favorite Basketball Player
  4. Small-Business tax breaks
  5. First Activity on Nov 7
  6. Most Difficult Decision
  7. Money in Politics
  8. White House Beer Recipe
  9. Jobs
  10. Work/Life Balance

Hard hitting stuff there

What would you have asked? Those are all pretty topical this particular election season. Any 10 questions seem inadequate for a president, no?

Also, he brought up Afghanistan on his own in response to the 'hardest decision' question. That's not exactly a fluff answer.

They are largely boilerplate answers to softball questions. Nothing you couldn't get from listening to a White House press conference.

Questions about the state of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, Egypt, et al would have been more interesting. Characterizing sending more troops as a hard decision is not too surprising.

Ok, but all you're gonna get from him on foreign relations ESPECIALLY is the exact boilerplate that comes out of the state department. There are actually policy reasons to stay boilerplate on that stuff, above and beyond political considerations.

That said, he did come about as close as he could to acknowledging the surge in Afghanistan didn't accomplish much. And he called for a constitutional amendment on Citizen's United, which he apparently hadn't done in public before (according to news outlets trumpeting it).

Bradley Fucking Manning?

> Presumably has has other things to do.

I also have things to do and manage to fit in at least a couple of hours a day on reddit

Presumably, what you have to do isn't as important nor as time demanding as what the president has to do.

That's 3 minutes per question, given the half hour he allotted. I don't think that's too disappointing. Did you really expect him to answer 12,000 questions?

Is there actually some video proof that he is actually there?

Or is it just some assistant yelling from the other room "should I rephrase our standard answer on campaign reform" and his answer is "yes".

there was a jpg of BO with a mac in a windowless room

edit: link Verification photo: http://i.imgur.com/oz0a7.jpg

For perspective: I read a bit in the most recent New Yorker describing a fund-raiser dinner with the president; it was $50,000 a plate and the president had one hour which equated to 1 minute per person. His staff knew he wouldn't have time to eat so he was prepared a meal he ate quickly in the kitchen beforehand. A staffer with a watch would tap him on the shoulder every 5 minutes when he needed to move onto the next table.

And 3 times as long seems perfectly reasonable to me when you're giving answers in writing compared to talking...

I expect the staffers answering the questions to put in some more time, but then that'd ruin the facade.

Quite possible he simply wasn't able to access the site like everyone else!

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