President Obama atwitter

That was quite a leap forward in the art of communication the other day when President Barack Obama agreed to shill for the further dumbing-down of public discourse by holding a phony Twitter exchange at the White House.

In what was billed a "Twitter Town Hall," the president of the United States fielded questions by way of the gimmicky social medium, which reduces computer conversations to 140-character bites. Obama, completely ignoring the imposed character limit, answered 18 submitted questions verbally rather than via keyboard, in the presence, inexplicably, of a young Twitter co-founder.

According to a diligent counter at The New York Times, his longest answer used 3,991 characters and the shortest 1,117, in this latest advance in informing the American public.

Most of the questions were predictable and answered by Obama in customary boilerplate, including reiteration of his warning of dire consequences if Congress doesn't agree to raise the federal debt limit. "Then the Treasury will run out of money," he warned, before going on far beyond the Twitter limit. "Potentially the entire world capital markets could decide, you know what, the full faith and credit of the United States doesn't mean anything. And so our credit could be downgraded, interest rates could go drastically up, and it could cause a whole new spiral into a second recession, or worse."

Any Twitter user could pose a question, but somehow, among the handful of questions used, one came from House Speaker John Boehner. He made the cut by repeating what he had often asked publicly, this time in 73 characters: "After embarking on a record spending binge that's left us deeper in debt, where are the jobs?"

Obama replied verbally, according to the Times' patient counter, in 3,111 characters, pointing out at the same time that Boehner's question was "slightly skewed." The president then recited his standard defense, that the country was in an "8-million-job hole ... before our economic policies had a chance to take any effect," but since then 2 million jobs have been created in the public sector and millions more would be available though his call for infrastructure rehabilitation.

Also getting in a tweeted question was New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who asked: "Was it a mistake to fail to get Republicans to commit to raise the debt limit ceiling at the same time tax cuts were extended?" Obama replied to the effect that it wasn't a hot issue at the time the Bush cuts were being debated.

One might have thought that both Boehner and Kristof, patronizingly called "a great journalist" by the president, could have reached him, as used to be said in pre-Twitter days, by dropping a dime.

Obama's resort to the latest shorthand to reach, and presumably inform, the public follows his use of those two other wonders of the social media, Facebook and YouTube, earlier this year. But in those ventures, as far as we know he didn't violate any of the ground rules. Twitter supposedly is designed as the epitome of brevity, with an inherent challenge of clarity.

It's a harmless enough idea to have average Americans interrogate the president in 140 characters or less -- and certainly a relief from some of those long-winded and self-serving inquiries served up to him by celebrity reporters at the now-occasional televised news conferences.

But this Twitter Town Hall was a very poor substitute, for instance, for the live ones during presidential campaigns in which selected undecided voters say what's on their minds face-to-face to the candidates. Some of the most revealing answers have been drawn from our would-be and actual leaders by such inquisitors speaking from the depths of personal hardship and pain.

Also, there's nothing like a sharp and direct in-person query on how much or how little a public figure knows about facts or history to reveal his or her qualifications for a job sought or already held. Nor a well-expressed question delivered verbally out of the blue that can measure wit as well as wisdom on the receiving end.

As for Twitter, when it comes to intelligent communication, as movie sage Samuel Goldwyn used to say: Include me out.

Jules Witcover is a columnist for Tribune Media Services. His email address is juleswitcover@comcast.net.