Your Interview with President Obama

Earlier today, for the second year in a row, President Obama sat down with YouTube for his first interview after the State of the Union speech. The President took the opportunity to respond to the protests in Egypt for the first time, to address your concerns on jobs, the debt, and health care, and to answer a series of more personal questions that you submitted in video and text over the past few days on YouTube. The interview took place in the Diplomatic Room in the West Wing, which is the same room where FDR used to deliver his fireside chats.



All told, you submitted almost 140,000 questions to our Google Moderator platform over the past few days, and you cast more than 1.3 million votes on which questions you wanted to have asked. With so many compelling questions, it was a challenge to determine the final list to bring to the White House. Our goal was to cover a wide range of issues that were relevant following the State of the Union speech; to remove duplicate questions; and include video questions wherever possible. With those criteria in mind, we looked at the top 5% of the questions you voted to the top in order to determine which questions to pose to the President. None of the questions were chosen by the White House, or seen by the President before the interview. Here is a playlist of all the video questions that were asked:



We’ll be conducting a similar interview with U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner in a few weeks - stay tuned for more details. And we’re also expanding this YouTube Interview program globally as part of YouTube World View, a series of interviews in 2011 that will give you even more access and insight into leaders and elected officials from around the world.

Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, recently watched “Behind the scenes: Before and after the YouTube Interview with President Obama.”