La Mesan Honored to Have Front-Row Seat at Presidential Jobs Forum

Christina Bonner of La Mesa didn’t get to ask a question, but she had an answer for how she felt about attending a Silicon Valley town hall meeting with President Barack Obama courtesy of the networking site LinkedIn.

“It was absolutely one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had,” said Bonner, calling her selection out of millions of LinkedIn members an honor.

When the hourlong jobs forum with Obama ended Monday morning at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Bonner was next in line to ask a question, she said by phone Monday.

Her main interest revolved around education and the cost of college and graduate school.

“I used Pell Grants,” Bonner said by phone from a LinkedIn luncheon. A single mom, she recently paid off her college loans, she said. 

Bonner, 32, said she would have asked Obama about a way to “help make it easier to go to college,” since Pell Grants aren’t covering as much as they used to.

Her second question would have dealt with the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries.

“We really want to create a product with the made-in-USA label,” she said, referring to her employer. But “how do manufacturers compete with low-cost” rivals overseas?

Bonner lives in north La Mesa, near Parkway Middle School, where one of her two children is a seventh-grader. Her other child attends Murray Manor Elementary as a sixth-grader.

She was put up at the Four Seasons Hotel in East Palo Alto before the televised and Web-streamed forum, and she did have a chance to shake hands with Obama, she said.

Bonner also shared the rumor that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend were at the event.

“They snuck in and snuck out,” she said she heard.

Wearing what she called a “business-appropriate suit,” with a pinkish/purple blouse and gray slacks, Bonner was one of 20 LinkedIn members invited to quiz the president, who was stumping for his jobs program.

Bonner, a La Mesan for 11 years, said she was contacted a week ago Sunday after filling out a survey.

In the survey, she described how she had made the jump from single mom of two children, unemployed for six months, to operations manager at Animal Cell Therapies Inc., a biotech that seeks stem cell treatments for companion animals suffering from acute and chronic diseases.

LinkedIn then interviewed her by phone as part of the selection process that led to her being seated only feet from the commander in chief.

But she didn’t know she’d be seeing the leader of the free world until the middle of last week.

“It was quite shocking,” she said.

She said she’d fly home Monday night, landing at Lindbergh Field after her brush with history.