TheAgitator.com
Good for Obama
Saturday, January 17th, 2009This is more important than it might first appear:
Despite legal and security hurdles, president-elect Barack Obama says he has a plan to retain his beloved Blackberry once he moves into the White House next week.
Interviewed by CNN Friday, Obama said the smartphone was among the tools that he would use to stay in touch with real Americans and avoid becoming trapped inside the presidential “bubble.”
“I think we’re going to be able to hang on to one of these. My working assumption, and this is not new, is that anything I write on an email could end up being on CNN,” he said.
“So I make sure to think before I press ’send’,” he said of his Blackberry, which was an ever-present fixture on his belt or in his hand on the campaign trail.
Obama did not divulge just how he will overcome legal constraints, given the requirement of the post-Watergate Presidential Records Act of 1978 to keep a record of every White House communication.
Nor did he say how he would persuade his Secret Service protectors that the Blackberry does not pose a security risk, for instance if it is hacked over the air.
But Obama, who succeeds the unpopular George W. Bush on Tuesday, said the phone was a valuable part of a wider strategy to escape the White House fishbowl.
“It’s just one tool among a number of tools that I’m trying to use, to break out of the bubble, to make sure that people can still reach me,” he said.
“If I’m doing something stupid, somebody in Chicago can send me an email and say, ‘What are you doing?’
“I want to be able to have voices, other than the people who are immediately working for me, be able to reach out and send me a message about what’s happening in America.”
Gene Healy gets into the problems of a president isolated on an island in an ocean of yes-men in his book The Cult of the Presidency. It’s good that Obama recognizes the problems presented by the presidential bubble, and is at least trying to take some steps to mitigate them.
This will last until he receives his second Goatse link.
This is the second or third time I’ve read about Obama’s concerns about being isolated and surrounded by a staff that just tells him what he wants to hear. I think this is a good and healthy sign that he has that concern.
Good. There.is so much wrong information in the DC establishment class. CNN did a two hour show on the deficit with mentioning defense or prison spending
that’s nice. with the blackberry, and its constant contact with the world-wide-web, President Obama will be able to stay in touch with his high school classmates, grow his penis, and lose weight without dieting.
i feel the world getting better already
That’s great news. Now I just need to know what Obama ate for dinner last night and what he watched on TV.
I’m curious. Couldn’t he just keep a ‘personal’ blackberry and deal with all ‘professional’ business through other means? Is a President beholden to the records act for using a personal device to discuss something with this daughter?
I keep multiple devices for just this need – one for personal, one for my primary employer, and maybe one or more for clients (depending on their requirements). Physical separation is a good thing even if its a pain.
>>>“If I’m doing something stupid, somebody in Chicago can send me an email and say, ‘What are you doing?’<<<
He needs to be able to receive instructions from his masters in the Chicago political machine.
He came from nowhere in the party. You all don’t actually believe he is his own man, do you?
Doesn’t anyone read this site?
If so, do you retain the information?
Barack Obama is a POLITICIAN, a professional, and top in his class — he made it to the chauffeur’s seat.
Here’s one I bet you’ve heard before:
Q: “How do you know when a politician is lying?”
A: “When his lips are moving.”
Shocking credulousness displayed on this site. And he shall lead little children.
I’m skeptical. Obama wouldn’t be so fond of his beloved Marxist ideas if it were not for his life in a bubble. All this babble about bubbles is just PR BS.
http://www.rightklik.net/
#8 Cynical:
Some of us just appreciate small steps towards progress when we see them, Cynical. You know, sometimes when people are extremely cynical, they miss these little signs, and belittle those of us who recognize them. Since when is guarded optimism a sign of credulity? Oh well, I know by now that your mind is pretty much made up, but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on you. Have you given up on us?
Un, shouldn’t that be “berry of color”?
Somehow I remain unconvinced that Obama allowing people to contact him via his blackberry is akin to giving him an extra ear to listen to regular people. Just how many regular people will have blackberry messages read by Obama?
I suppose it’s better than deliberately refusing to read newspapers or anything else that might contradict you.
Wasn’t this rule put in place by the Democrats. And I would have to wonder what would have been said if Bush had wanted to do this. I think we all know the answer to that. As far as him being able to talk to his children, he does it the same way every president before him with children has done it.
I’m not sure if the blackberry is a deal but his awareness that there are legal obligations on record keeping is a giant improvement on the previous administration (sad as it is that our expectations have been set this low after 8 years of ‘accidentally deleted’ emails and evidence that seems to suddenly be dug up at convenient moments).
the word ‘big’ fits somewhere in the first sentence there.
anarch wins the thread
First I read that as His Awareness, as in His Majesty, ’cause, He’s like, so, all aware, y’know?
I don’t suppose he’ll much care when the rest of the country thinks he’s doing something stupid. Just Chicago.
Totally agree with Cynical in CA and PolyTick. Thank you. Also, okay, who among us answers and pays attention to every text we get? Especially when it’s something we don’t want to care about anyway. And hell, the White House has had an email address for years that us peasants can use to send email. I guess all those emails questioning Bush’s decisions got lost in the ether.
Sheesh. Some people will swallow any swill (pun completely intended) presented to them. “Look! I text! I care! CHANGE!” and the people say, “Yay!” Ugh.
I think it’s a small step, but still relevant. First off, it means that he recognizes that all his communication is on record, unlike Bush, and hopefully he won’t take steps like using private email accounts for official business. Second, it gets rid of a filter. Rather than having all his information come through a few of his staff, he can access email/internet wherever he is. Again, it’s not much, but that doesn’t make it meaningless.
Does anyone actually believe that Obama will accept communications from anyone who isn’t screened by his personally-chosen associates? I see no way that using a Blackberry device instead of an official communicator would in any way make Obama more accessible to ordinary people; it would, however, allow more possibilities for off-the-record communications with associates. The latter may or may not be seen as a problem, but I see no reason to claim it as a plus.
Well he is a couple of years (if not a decade) ahead of the Republicans on this.
At least he has gotten this far:
“So I make sure to think before I press ’send’”
“Since when is guarded optimism a sign of credulity?” — Helmut O’Hooligan
Helmut, I miss our chats.
Let me steer you in the right direction.
“We Won’t Get Fooled Again” — The Who, Who’s Next, 1971
It’s one of my faves. I’m sure it’s one of yours too. Give it another listen.
Ahh……the decisions one make make when they have a willing and accomodating press corps willing to overlook all of the shortcomings of their newly-elected dear leader……….
Was that Blackberry or Crackberry? Damn those little things are addictive…
This decision sounds nice in the abstract, but let’s be practical; between contant meetings, briefings, phone calls, official events, white house email, and a million other distractors, the POTUS is going to have little time to devote to whoever is sending him emails/text messages to the blackberry that “tell it like it is”. Not to mention, how many more messages will he be getting through it now? Is it a small, select group that has his number, or is everybody and his brother going to be giving it out?
If this is really indicative of his attitude towards outside advice, great. The device itself however, I just don’t think it will be that big a deal (good or bad).
Thread Motto:
Spin to Win
ffs
Umm, isn’t this backwards? The White House will have at least a handfull of people floating around that Obama did not pick. Further, the people who could read communication under Watergate-response legislation would certianly not be Obama’s friends.
By moving communication to a personally maintained channels of communication he is setting himself to *only* communicate with people he feels like talking to. He’s inevitably going to get a less diverse set of inputs and a vastly smaller set of good challenges to his ideas.
Just think about your friends who have started getting information from blogs rather than from their real-life aquaintences. Imagine those who go to the Agitor, and those who go to DailyKOS. In my experience, such people do not have a wider set of perspectives. They read the same stuff every day and thus become more extreme and isolated.
Overall, I’ve long thought we should get used to the idea that people can talk to whomever they want, including presidents. I just find it bizarre that Bush gets consistently dinged whenever he has a private meeting, but if Obama does it, he’s “getting out of the fishbowl”.
In his most recent display of poor judgment, Obama stands by his treasury pick, who doesn’t pay his taxes (and pocketed the money he received to pay them) for four years; this is called an “honest mistake”. The explanations for this don’t even pass the smell test. Obama apparently believes that there is one set of rules for those high in government, and another set for the peons. In this he is no worse than most politicians, and only provides more evidence that we should trust him as much as we trust others of his profession.
Now he is setting himself up to be able to violate rules regarding White House communications anytime he chooses, and Mr. Balko seems to think that not only should we give him the benefit of the doubt here, but we should applaud this decision. Usually one who argues for open government and one set of laws for everyone, suddenly Balko has dropped his healthy suspicion of government officials and their motives, and laps up Obama’s justification that without his Blackberry, he’d have no way to communicate with his circle of friends. Balko even goes along with the idea that having his Blackberry to communicate (without having to keep all those pesky records like those silly laws require) with the inner circle that actually have his contact info will somehow make Obama less insular. With respect, perhaps it’s time Mr. Balko considers placing HIMSELF on the “Hack Watch” list.
“I just find it bizarre that Bush gets consistently dinged whenever he has a private meeting….”
The problem with Bush’s private meetings were that we had no idea who he was meeting with or the topics of the meetings.
So far we know everyone who has attended the meetings with Obama.
So far….
#30:
A bit of tepid praise for Obama for keeping an open line to the world outside the Beltway, and I’m a hack?
Please. The president surrounds himself with “yes” men, intentionally or not. People are afraid to stand up to him. Read interviews with presidential aides over the years. Rare is the person who has the guts to tell the president he’s wrong. Sometimes, it takes someone who’s known the man all of his life and who has some outside perspective to say, “Hey, what the hell are you doing, here?”
Nowhere in the article does it say that Obama won’t be saving copies of his Blackberry correspondence. It says they were trying to figure out how to let him keep the Blackberry while still complying with federal record-keeping requirements. Which to me reads like they’re trying to figure out a way to make sure his Blackberry emails get saved.
Groupthink is dangerous. Obama seems to recognize both that, and that the bubble dynamics of the office he’s about to occupy makes groupthink almost inevitable. He deserves credit for both recognizing the problem and at least trying to take steps to keep himself grounded.
This is particularly true given that we’ve just endured eight years with a president who, to give just one example, had his staff cut all the negative articles out of his newspapers before he read them. Which means for about the last three years, he’s been reading little more than the sports page.
As for Geitner, I’m not particularly fond of him, but mostly because he supports the bailout. I haven’t read enough about the tax story to have an opinion, but as a libertarian, I’m not particularly eager to disqualify someone for public office because they neglected to pay some taxes. That’s damn-near a plus in my book.
Do italics tags work here? Scared to post without a preview button…
All righty, then. Let’s proceed.
I have to admit I’m a bit perplexed, on several fronts.
Why is this a big deal, exactly? OK, so he’ll read his messages on a device called a “Blackberry” rather than on a device called a “personal computer.” How does this make someone any more or less accessible to the outside world?
Additionally: Why would copies of the correspondence be some tricky issue? They’re e-mails. E-mails don’t just vanish after they’re received. How is this some issue that has to be “overcome,” as the article puts it?
Speaking of which: At least three of you are congratulating Obama for something the article doesn’t attribute to him. To wit…
Bernard: “his awareness that there are legal obligations on record keeping is a giant improvement”
Travis: “First off, it means that he recognizes that all his communication is on record, unlike Bush”
Balko: “It says they were trying to figure out how to let him keep the Blackberry while still complying with federal record-keeping requirements.”
While Obama may indeed have “awareness,” “recognize” and be “trying to figure out,” we don’t know that from this article. All we know from the article is that its author is aware of record-keeping requirements. It doesn’t say anything about Obama knowing anything.
Finally: Aspasia wrote, “Some people will swallow any swill (pun completely intended)…” What’s the pun?
“…we’ve just endured eight years with a president who, to give just one example, had his staff cut all the negative articles out of his newspapers before he read them.”
Do you have a cite for this or did you just make it up out of thin air in order to dis a president you hate?
I am genuinely curious because, first, it sounds like typical BDS bullshit to me, and second, I did an internet search – including Snopes and “The Smoking Gun” – and I could find nothing even close.
But, I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
Nowhere in the article does it say that Obama won’t be saving copies of his Blackberry correspondence.
Even if one accepts that Obama will save all correspondence in 100% compliance with all statutory and regulatory requirements, I’m not quite clear why his use of a Blackberry will magically cause him to receive input from anyone he would not do so otherwise. Exactly where is the upside in his use of the Blackberry.
The only conceivable upsides I could see would be if:
The people who operate the Blackberry network are more honest and loyal to Constitutional government than those who handle the White House network. If true, that would be scary–using a Blackberry would hardly be the proper remedy.
Obama wishes to correspond with people whom he would be unable to do so via the White House network, for either regulatory or technical reasons. I can’t think of any reason Obama would be unable to use the White House network to correspond with people he should be corresponding with.
Yes, I know it might be a nuisance to have to adapt to new communications gear while serving as President, but the presidency is a job with enormous responsibility which will pose many larger inconveniences; a refusal to accept even the smaller inconveniences would to me imply an unsuitability for office.
Blogging from Indianapolis
The Honorables
Catch Inaugural Fever
http://www.izerc.com/?p=284
Everyone is assuming that because Obama said he will do this, that it will be a reality. Unless and until I am able to send an email to his Blackberry and have some level of assurance that a response is from him, I will put this in the “cheap talk” category. I suggest everyone think about that, and realize that words are worth nothing — from ANYONE, unless you have personal interaction with a person and a track record by which to personally judge them or have someone whose word you will trust about another person.
I’m not sure why a Blackberry is necessary for any of this. As mentioned above the Whitehouse network can receive messages from “outside the fishbowl”.
Also, I am curious to know who these “outside people” are who will be contacting the President. With 300 million people in the country, he certainly won’t be hearing from the people at large without some significant filtering.
Radley,
I remember you criticizing Palin for using a private yahoo account.
Double standard?
I’ll try again: Can somebody please explain what I’m not grasping about the nature of a Blackberry (or about what you all perceive to be its nature)? I’m genuinely asking — is there some aspect of it I don’t understand?
What makes reading digital messages on a Blackberry different from reading digital messages on a desktop computer, or from a laptop, or from a printout provided by an aide? How is the Blackberry any more accessible to “outside people”? How is the data received by it immune to record-keeping?
Mostly, what I don’t understand is the fundamental argument in this thread: that a Blackberry is a conduit to “outside the bubble.” How? Are Blackberry addresses public? Are they more widely known than the White House’s snail-mail address, e-mail addy or public phone line?
I guess I just don’t grasp how a Blackberry is anything but a tool for the same communication one would already have been conducting by some other means.
There’s nothing about a blackberry that makes it immune from record keeping. The blackberry still goes through a POP or IMAP mail server, which can absolutely be set up to archive messages even after you hit “delete” in your client. Plenty of corporate IT infrastructure is set up this way. The record-keeping “issue” is just bad reporting.
Seriously, get the stars out of your eyes.
This is incredibly troubling:
Radley says “Nowhere in the article does it say that Obama won’t be saving copies of his Blackberry correspondence.”
Um, it also never says that he will. “Overcoming legal constraints” doesn’t sound a whole lot like “Fully complying with both the letter and the spirit of open records requirements.”
To me, and to our host when he’s talking about politicians other than Obama, that sounds an awful lot like “we found a loophole.”
That would be fine if Geitner didn’t want anybody else to pay taxes, either. But his job will now entail sending Americans to jail for doing what he did. So no, I’m not a fan.
(Geitner “forgot” to play $40,000 or so in taxes. He “remembered” to pay some of them the day Obama picked him. He also remembered to cash the reimbursement checks that the IMF was cutting him to cover the taxes he never paid.)
Chris,
I don’t know for sure, but my guess was that it’s not the device, but the network. If Obama gets his email directly via his preexisting email account, then he’ll bypass whatever auditing and archiving is done for president@whitehouse.gov.
I’m just continually bemused by people’s response to this sort of thing. When someone you don’t like breaks rules, they think they are above it all. When it’s someone you like, they are cutting through red tape and escaping the fish bowl. When it’s someone you don’t like, the Constitution is a holy relic that all decent people believe in. When it’s someone you do like, it’s just a bunch of formalities, and they need to be reinterpreted with the changing times.
To me, and to our host when he’s talking about politicians other than Obama, that sounds an awful lot like “we found a loophole.”
Once again, I’m not sure why anybody is interpreting ANYTHING about Obama’s perspective or plans regarding record-keeping, based on this story. The story doesn’t say, “Obama said he would not divulge.” It doesn’t even say, “Obama would not divulge.” The story simply notes that “Obama did not divulge,” and nothing more.
The piece doesn’t indicate if the record-keeping aspect was even broached with Obama. All we know from the piece is that the WRITER has thought about it. He’s simply informing readers that there is a record-keeping law. He doesn’t say “Obama dodged questions about it” or “Obama refused to divulge.” He’s simply saying “I don’t know what Obama’s plans are. That information has not been communicated to me.”
This entire thread has been oddly fascinating to me. Not sure exactly why. The topic isn’t even that important. There are just so many thing askew, in terms of people’s basic interpretations, assumptions and conclusions. It’s just kind of weird.
I don’t know for sure, but my guess was that it’s not the device, but the network. If Obama gets his email directly via his preexisting email account, then he’ll bypass whatever auditing and archiving is done for president@whitehouse.gov.
Well, Christ, why didn’t somebody just SAY that?!
There have been so many unspoken assumptions by so many people here, such as …
… “using his Blackberry” equals “using his private e-mail address”
… communication with Obama will now be possible by people who otherwise would have been unable to communicate with him
… this communication will keep him connected “outside the bubble” in some groundbreaking way
… the writer of the linked AFP piece specifically asked Obama how he would address record-keeping concerns, and Obama specifically refused to provide that information
… because “record-keeping” is mentioned in an AFP piece, Obama has plans to comply with record-keeping requirements, unlike Bush
Like I say, kind of weird.
This is poor judgment from Obama. He is ignoring the very real national security issues involved here.
If he carries this, he will be wearing a combination transceiver/microphone. All the time. You and I really don’t have much to worry about in regards to a foreign power hacking our phones and turning them into bugs. He does. RIM isn’t even an American company — they are Canadian. (You know, the same company that he is going to “re-negotiate” NAFTA with? Which he will presumably discuss with his staff wearing a device programmed out of Canada.) He will also be wearing a device that allows radio triangulation. I have to question whether or not he is going to go for convenience over the advice of his Intel/Military advisers on more significant issues (and this one is pretty damned significant.)
His #1 job is Commander-in-Chief. He is already, with this decision, slacking on that commitment. He would rather be governor-in-chief, and that isn’t good enough. I can think of another president who chose convenience and appearance over security. He got shot in the head in Dallas, and I don’t want to see that repeated by another adolescent thinking president.
(I meant to say country rather than company in regards to Canada.)
Agreed Phelps. I know something about this subject, but of course I can’t prove it here. NSA, WHCA, USSS have got to be going nuts about this. The Blackberry’s got to go.
Didn’t think so.
The Post tried to spin this as Bush’s fault – like those old, un-hip Republican luddites just didn’t like technology so all the White House systems are old and inadequate. Not so – it’s just government security and budget requirements. Everything’s older because older systems are well understood and supported. Also cheaper than the latest technology. In my agency, it can take six months or more to get a piece of software approved for *testing* on one of our networks. Obama will have to deal with this just like every president has had to. I know it sounds like a cliche but…the rules are there for a reason.