Obama's town hall: A show-me state

by Mark Silva

The "town hall'' is becoming a fixture of President Barack Obama's line of communication with the American public, a line that he opens when the going gets tough.

He will open one Wednesday, on the 100th day of his presidency, in Missouri, the same day that he stands for a prime-time evening press conference in Washington.

For a president who has spoken of seeing "glimmers of hope'' in the economy, while warning that Americans are "not out of the woods yet,'' the coming weeks are likely to bring more bad news: The April unemployment report, for instance.

And for a president who has promised "transparency'' in his domestic and foreign policies, the imminent release of hundreds of photographs of the treatment of prisoners in "the war on terror'' that the Obama administration no longer calls the war on terror but rather a battle with al Qaeda will add fuel to the fire started with Obama's disclosure of the Bush Justice Department memoranda justifying the harshest iterrogation tactics -- including that water-boarding used on two al Qaeda chieftains 266 times.

The president will be asked to account for all of this -- why the CIA operatives who carried out those interrogations now characterized as torture by Obama's own attorney general should remain exempt from prosecution, why he is leaving the door open for the Justice Department to take action on higher-level authorities who authorized all that and where this business of a "truth commission'' looking into it all may lead.

That will come Wednesday night, at the televised press conference, no doubt. The town hall that the president convenes on Wednesday in Missouri, like the town halls that he conducted in Florida and Indiana earlier this year when he was pressing for his $787-billion economic stimulus bil, is likely to conjure up differnt sorts of questions -- street-level questions, the kind that any president likes to answer.

One hundred days in, with his third formal press conference at the White House, the president is getting a certain rhythm about his conversation with a public which, according to the polls, generally approves of the way he is conducting himself. Show me, they say in Missouri. Obama will try to tell all.