If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past. Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts. What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.
If this was all that a reader took in before moving on, it would be easy to be misinformed. The truth is that, instead of simply not bothering to upgrade, the Bush administration had legal reasons and budgetary concerns that prevented them from turning the White House into a shiny Apple Store. To Kornblut's credit she then went into the messy failure of the purported most transparent administration in history for updating the Obama Web pages that are supposed to show America his actions and schedule. Kornblut properly notes that the lack of updating as promised was not quite in keeping with campaign rhetoric. "Nor did the site reflect the transparency Obama promised to deliver," Kornblut said. Unfortunately, it wasn't until the end of the story that we finally see Kornblut admitting that the lack of a tech paradise in the White House is partly due to the legal issues that force this Luddite existence on the president's office.
Senior advisers chafed at the new arrangements, which severely limit mobility -- partly by tradition but also for security reasons and to ensure that all official work is preserved under the Presidential Records Act
This is the main reason that George W. Bush ceased using email and computers once he became president. Chances are President BlackBerry will eventually find that he will have to suffer the same no-computers fate in many more ways than he wants to. Let’s face reality about computers and the president, any president. Thanks to the over-use of the attack dogs called “special prosecutors,” and the overweening interference of the Executive Branch by Congress, no president is even going to bother using e-mail and computers very much once they realize the troubles it will bring. In May of 2008, Bush even claimed that he looks forward to using e-mail to contact friends and family again after he leaves office. In a report on the president’s remarks, a New York Times blog reported that “Mr. Bush stopped e-mailing when he entered the White House, citing security worries, and the Oval Office does not have a computer in it.” Unfortunately, Kornblut does not elucidate these salient points well favoring casting President Bush as a computer illiterate.
