Politics & Communication with Joshua Gee

Good news everyone! The White House has invited two of the bloggers behind the peerless Consumerist to come to Washington and conduct an on-camera Q&A with senior economic adviser Austan Goolsbee. They will be talking about credit card reform, which the President has been pushing hard lately, and the team from the Consumerist is soliciting questions from their readers (click the link above and submit your questions in the comments). Originally part of Gawker, the Consumerist was recently cut loose and then purchased by the Consumer’s Union. That move from commercial blog to non-profit advocacy probably made this invitation possible, but it is hard to say.

This is a great. Though not as true as it used to be, many organizations are still nervous about bloggers, who don’t play by the older media/source rules. Because bloggers tend to blur those lines between opinion and reporting, the simple act of sitting down with them and soliciting their input can go a long way towards getting them on your side. Additionally, many people in government and business underestimate how much bloggers can bring to the table in terms of knowledge of the issues they write about and the best way to present them to the public.

On another level, I love this because I now know there will be a video and transcripts of Goolsbee answering basic questions about credit card reform. My only fear is that the team from The Consumerist will be awed by their surroundings and won’t hold Goolsbee’s feet to the fire and press for plain-English answers to their questions.

ht Personal Democracy Forum

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari were both on Meet the Press yesterday, capping off a week-long goodwill tour of U.S. I can’t remember when in my political education I realized that people don’t go on Meet the Press in order to talk to the public at large or discuss ideas, but rather to campaign among a very specific subset of policy elite. It was odd to see elected leaders of countries that the United States sort of controls (or in the case of Pakistan props up the government) spending precious campaign time talking to David Gregory. I guess they feel those policy elite are a key constituency in getting them reelected. Imperialism is weird, man.