CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
– EXECUTIVE BRANCH
Corrected April 7, 2009 – 8:51 a.m.
Obama Online: It Was Easier During Campaign
By Adriel Bettelheim, CQ Staff
Few people understand the challenges of transitioning from political campaigns to governing quite the way Macon Phillips does.
The 30-year-old self-professed computer nerd from Huntsville, Ala. helped run Barack Obama ’s wildly successful online presidential campaign – a smorgasbord of mass e-mails, videos and virtual networking that mobilized millions of small donors and helped Obama sweep the under-30 vote.
Now, Phillips is trying to transfer the campaign’s high-tech kismet to the presidential web site, WhiteHouse.Gov, to further Obama’s pledge to run the most transparent and accountable administration in history. But like message-mongers before him, Phillips is discovering that it isn’t easy to adapt the freewheeling spirit of a campaign to the physical and virtual confines of the White House.
Obama’s Internet campaign empowered a young segment of the population long thought to be politically apathetic. Two million people created profiles on Obama’s social network, My.BarackObama.com, and used it as a venue to hold policy discussions and organize get-out-the-vote efforts and phone banks. The outreach netted half a billion dollars in online donations, mostly in increments of $100 or less.
Phillips’ challenge is to maintain all the buzz and connectivity without engaging in overt politicking or fundraising on a government web site. His effort is built around three principles: communicating about issues, being transparent about the business of government and soliciting audience participation through online features.
But some of those goals have proven elusive thanks to creaky government technology and time-consuming legal strictures, such as a requirement in the Presidential Records Act (PL 95-591) to archive Web pages whenever they are modified, in order to preserve administration communications.
Partly as a result, the administration hasn’t been able to keep a campaign pledge to post non-emergency bills to the Web for five days of public comment before Obama signs them — most recently on a measure (
Government watchdog groups also complain that the administration has failed to post important executive orders and official correspondence that Obama issued.
Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the American Federation of Scientists, cited the absence of unclassified directives ordering the reorganization of the National Security Council and ordering a review of homeland security and counterterrorism activities.
“I think the White House has basically given precedence to public persuasion over documentation . . . on interpreting events than on providing direct public access to primary sources,” Aftergood said, noting that the site gave display space to First Lady Michelle Obama’s recent visit to a Washington nonprofit that serves meals to the homeless. “The good news is that these are gaps that can be filled if there is a will to do so.”
Even some of the widgets Obama’s online team deployed haven’t delivered as expected.
When Obama presided over a virtual town hall meeting at the White House on March 26, proponents of legalizing marijuana repeatedly clicked an online voting feature to make it appear the question most Americans wanted to ask Obama was whether he was in favor of decriminalizing the drug. He is not.
“Every president wants to adapt the latest technologies to help communicate his ideas, but some are better than others,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University, who said Obama’s site is difficult to navigate. She has taken to scanning the Federal Register and the Senate calendar for information about presidential appointments, reports to Congress and other official correspondence.
Phillips absorbs the critiques with equanimity, urging critics to be patient and pointing to features like a blog written by a rotating cast of administration officials he sayd help convey a sense of authenticity that carries over from the campaign.
“The voices, the content you read on the blog, the fact that we’re open for questions and you see the president answer them shows that we’re not considering the web site as some other piece, as an add-on,” Phillips said. “It is the source for a lot of news, the tool that can be used to help us achieve our goals.”
Such virtual salesmanship is light years from the presidential communications strategies of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke to middle America by cutting video segments for regional TV stations in a small studio equipped with a single camera.
President Bill Clinton added interactivity by holding events such as a satellite-linked question-and-answer session from the White House with children in 1993, and by launching the first White House Web site— called “Welcome to the White House — in October 1994.
The administration of George W. Bush refined and expanded the site to widespread acclaim, using soft features like Christmastime videos of the president’s dog, Barney, to draw visitors in.
Both Bush and Clinton’s administrations posted transcripts of daily press briefings — a practice the Obama White House halted.
Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary to both Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said while the latest technologies will invariably draw new audiences, the success of any communications strategy is measured by the public’s response to administration initiatives.
“Reagan was called ‘The Great Communicator,” and Obama and Clinton have been very effective, as well,” Fitzwater said. “But the difference was that after Reagan gave a speech, 10,000 people would be calling Congress demanding they follow his budget reductions. The new administration may have flashy equipment to send messages to hundreds of thousands of people, but the point is, it doesn’t matter how effective they are at sending out messages. It’s how and whether people respond.”
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Phillips came to Obama’s campaign midway through the election cycle from Blue State Digital, a Washington-based Democratic consultancy that specializes in new media. During the transition, he rebuilt the White House site from the ground up, adding video features and launching the blog soon after Obama was sworn in. He also added a White House channel on the social networking site YouTube
Working with about a half-dozen other aides in temporary quarters on the first floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Phillips also has a hand in managing the Recovery.Gov Web site, which details how the government is spending the $787 billion in the economic stimlus package (PL 111-5), and a subsection of the White House site devoted to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ’s middle-class task force.
On a recent morning, Phillips sat in his darkened office, reviewing lessons learned from the online town hall meeting, planning more virtual sessions and evaluating new software and services that could be connected to the main White House site.
“What you’re seeing is a White House that’s not afraid to take risks . . . to more creatively engage with citizens,” Phillips said.
Addressing the seemingly rigged vote during the online meeting, he said, “I think people understand with risks comes challenges. People understand that the more than 100,000 people who participated are a specific self-selecting population. Nevertheless, it’s 100,000 people we may not have communicated with otherwise.”
Phillips will get more opportunities to connect thanks to a new agreement between the General Services Administration and several third-party sites.
Under the agreement, federal agencies now have permission to use four Web 2.0 services — Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv — without having to negotiate individual agreements. Phillips says he is approaching the opportunity in two stages: first, by pumping White House information on to the social networking sites, then “building community,” around the content by allowing people to write comments and share videos and photos online, similar to the way Obama supporters coalesced during his campaign.
“The average user will just find we’re making content much more accessible to people,” Phillips said. “Hopefully it adds a way to make the administration itself more transparent. But there’s also an opporunity to allow people to participate themselves, by joining vibrant and active web communities.”
And Phillips sees the presidential Web site as a kind of motivational tool for other government agencies to develop innovative content, and is avoiding the temptation to impose one-size-fits-all solutions.
“There’s a tendency to want to organize and control all the sites and help them all improve,” Phillips said. “Our hope is as we develop programs like the town hall meeting, it’s a signal to other agencies and departments and they can take away lessons and value from our examples.”
First posted April 7, 2009 12:01 a.m.
Correction
Corrects to say Macon Phillips is from Huntsville, Ala.
Comments
Phillips is from Huntsville, AL--not Montgomery. Huntsville is a much more progressive and high tech city than Montgomery.
You could not click the same question more than once you moron. Also lets not forget that others opposed to the question could have marked it down. But not to many did. Your readers will set you straight and if they don't ,you wont have many.
This is a perfect example of how to hid things from the public and lie about everything. There will be NO transparency with Obama on the web, he will dumb down any thing and say, I did not know that. He will take no responsibility and push the blaim down the line. This poor guy actually believes in a whisp of change, get ready, for change from liberty to change to facasism.
Maybe it's a recent addition, but it sure looks to me like the transcripts of press briefings are on the White House web site, going all the way back to 1/22.
There is one thing to be a candidate for office where you say everything your audience wants to hear to get their votes, and there is another thing when you are elected, take over responsibility of the office, and, therefore, you have to behave responsibly. Political campaigns are a carnival, but the White House "bubble" - as Obama calls it- is not. Can he prick it? No. The white house will always be a bubble. That is why Dick Cheney run the U.S. government for 8 years under the George Bush label. Would Obama keep his promise for an open Internet window where Americans can peek in? Not really. Whenever there is an issue or decision that will make Obama shine in the eyes of the public, we will see it leaked or spread to the press like clean laundry in the white house press-line. On other obscure, cloudy, or matters that won't benefit the president's public image, the drying will be done inside the white house. Is Obama guilty of reneging on his campaign promises? Those who feel so will have a lot of time to prepare to ask Obama that question during his next re-election campaign. For the rest of us, it is just too much ado about nothing! Nikos Retsos, retired professor
About the stimulation on home mortages. My sister lives in Amboy, WA and has a manufactured home and hoped that she would be eligiable. She is not and wants to know why? There are many retired manufactured home owners that need this stimulation and are not qualified, why is that? They have to pay the same taxes as everyone else, they have the same financial problems as a "real home owner". What's the deal? Can I be wrong? Has she been given the wrong information? Please help.
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