In most cases, I have come to realize that the Obama administration is easier to understand if you dispense with the notion that there is some sort of plan other than getting through each day by minimizing immediate political damage to the highest degree possible without regard to long-term goals.
Continue reading Quote of the Day, I’ve Been Saying This Since Late 2009 edition.
Don’t they have people for this?
It was Mary Katherine Ham’s article that tipped me to the problem:
Barack Obama’s administration may be promising the “greatest ethical standard ever administered to an executive branch,” and increased transparency over his predecessor, but it seems to be forgoing at least one transparency practice that was routine in the Bush White House— transcripts of the daily press briefing.
It’s been four days since Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ first (and widely panned) appearance before the White House press corps, but no transcript, summary, or video of the event has shown up on WhiteHouse.gov. The delay could be forgiven in a less tech-savvy bunch, but given the Obama team’s considerable online skill, the omission of the the transcript is clearly intentional.
The decision to withhold transcripts is not a departure from the Obama Team’s online posture during the campaign, and signals that’s exactly the posture they intend to take for the next four years. Team Obama got a lot of credit for being an active online presence, which indeed it was, but that presence was built for message control, not openness. (My.BarackObama, the campaign’s social networking platform, is a different story, but it was cordoned off from the official campaign material, which was pretty tightly controlled.)
Continue reading Geez, the new Whitehouse.gov site is just plain *bad*.
