CONCRETELOOP.COM

In case you missed it, check out ‘A Conversation with President Obama’ in its entirety which aired commercial-free on BET, Centric, CMT, MTV, mtvU and Tr3s and streamed live on their websites on Thursday afternoon.

The town hall event, which took place in Washington before an audience of approximately 250 young people “representing a broad spectrum of backgrounds, interests and political viewpoints”, offered a question and answer session with the President on some important issues, including education, the economy and healthcare.

It also provided an opportunity for viewers to submit questions and express their hopes and fears. Two concerns raised included the fear that America is becoming a communist nation and that President Obama would be reelected. He used those comments to stress that ultimately we all share many of the same goals and should work together to ensure they are met: “This is an example of how our political rhetoric gets spun up. The internet and Twitter and all these things are very powerful but it also means sometimes that instead of having a dialogue, we just start calling … each other names, and that’s true on the left or the right. That’s something I think we’ve got to avoid,” he said.

The President also added:

“We’ve got to be able to have a conversation and recognize we’re all Americans, we all want the best for this country. We may have some disagreements in terms of how to get there but all of us want to make sure that our economy is strong, that jobs are growing. All of us want to make sure that people aren’t bankrupt when they get sick [and] all of us want to make sure that young people can afford an education. I’m pretty confident that if we work together over the next several years that the political temperature will go down, the political rhetoric will go down because we’ll actually be making progress on a lot of these issues.”