On June 11, 1995, President William Jefferson Clinton and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich met at the Invitation of the Congress of Claremont Senior Citizens, Inc. to debate issues affecting senior citizens. During the debate, the political foes shook hands and pledged to create a bi-partisan commission to study federal limits on lobbying and the financing of election campaigns.

Today's YouTube event at the White House, starring President Obama, CitizenTube director Steve Grove, and a bunch of user-generated questions from the public, has to be judged a success, in my view.

Every year at the annual Personal Democracy Forum, we pick a theme to help give our ongoing conversation a focus. Two years ago, it was "Rebooting America." Last year, it was "We.gov." This year, we've decided to borrow a little inspiration from our friends at Edge.org and go with a big question: Can the Internet Fix Politics?

MoveOn.org, the five-million member e-organization of progressive activists, is doing something really interesting with its members tonight: thousands of them are going to be participating in a live online dial-test of President Obama's State of the Union speech. The organization sent out an email earlier this evening to its list, asking people if they want to rate the speech live.

Are you live-blogging the State of the Union? Join the crowd.

David Plouffe is out with an email to Organizing for America's massive list, calling on Obama supporters to "regroup, refocus, and re-engage on the vital work ahead." The focal point of his missive: to attend State of the Union "watch parties" organized by OFA members around the country.

I was struck by something as I listened to President Obama speaking in Elyria, Ohio, last Friday, at one of the occasional townhalls he has held out in Ohio whenever he deems it important to get out of Washington and be seen "connecting" with the public.

It's interesting to see how the Internet factors into the Supreme Court's earthshaking decision in the Citizens United case to overturn a century's worth of jurisprudence restricting corporate and union money in politics. I'm going to skip over all the details of the case, and the equally troubling question of judicial activism, as these are really topics beyond the purview of techPresident and are already being hotly debated elsewhere.

A very quick comment on the meaning of yesterday's special election in Massachusetts, in terms of the role of technology in changing politics:

First, I couldn't agree more with what Nancy wrote here yesterday:

Politics junkies in the U.S. are focusing rabidly on today's special election in the Massachusetts Senate race, but it's worth noting that Haiti is still garnering much more attention online. Here's the Trendistic chart comparing tweets using the words "Haiti," "#MASen" (the generic hashtag for the race), "Scott Brown" and "Martha Coakley":

And here's a similar comparison using Google Insight for Search: