The Popup Presidency

I went to the White House website this morning, whitehouse.gov, looking for a copy of the President’s statement on the Boston Marathon Bombings, and instead found the front page roadblocked by this popup ad:
whitehousepopup
Now, the White House’s website is inevitably – and properly – going to reflect the president’s governing agenda. But it shouldn’t be necessary to explain why the White House deserves an official .gov website with less overt partisanship & more dignity than popup agitprop. The fact that the website would be doing this even this morning, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on American soil, is sadly reflective of the current occupant’s partisan smallness.
Joe Klein, usually a bitter-ender defender of all things Democratic, has complained of late that the shoddy implementation of Obamacare illustrates that “Barack Obama is not a ‘how’ President” – he’s long on public pressure campaigns and short on actually making the government run properly. So perhaps we should not be surprised that the White House website is now just another vehicle for left-wing community organizing. But we can still be disappointed that, five years into his Presidency, this is what it has come to.

180 thoughts on “The Popup Presidency”

  1. I’m actually surprised you think it’s proper that the official White House website should reflect the president’s governing agenda.
    The House, Senate, and SCOTUS websites (though SCOTUS is nonpartisan) all exist for the same purpose — to provide a nonpartisan outlet of information for visitors.
    I personally don’t think the actual House/Senate/administration should be in charge of their own websites, instead farming that out to the Architect of the Capitol, or whoever it is that runs the congressional websites.

  2. “But we can still be disappointed that, five years into his Presidency, this is what it has come to.”
    Agreed.
    Until he imprisons the bankers, who committed fraud which crashed the world’s economy, he’ll always be a disappointment.
    And the fact he imprisons whistle-blowers makes it doubly so.

  3. Obama is a hectoring bully, kicking and screaming when he doesn’t get his way. He’s a campaigner, and enough of the American voting public bought it… twice. But aside from campaign and complain, he’s incapable of anything else. It may be called Obamacare, but he sure didn’t write it, because he doesn’t know how anything works.

  4. It’s true, we can’t point to any job Obama’s done well other than getting himself elected, and I think the help is largely to be crdited for that. He was a lazy slacker as a legislator, both in Illinois and Washington. He has no significant accomplishment as a community organizer. There is some testimony that his first job editing newsletters was nothing to brag about. He is, in fact, a living example that the Peter principle is lacking in proof–it is possible to fail upwards.

  5. Which makes him different than his predecessor how exactly? (Other than the crashing of the world’s economy on his predecessor’s watch, of course).

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