In the age before Obama, Whitehouse.gov was an open page accessible to anyone without any requirements for inputting your email address. Prince Hopenchange, herald of the Most Transparent Government Evah, has put an end to that.
For a president whose administration has already been held in contempt of court by a federal judge and whose 2008 campaign openly accepted illegal foreign contributions, transforming the White House website into a voter outreach platform shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
Visitors to WhiteHouse.gov are now confronted with an email collection script.
It’s true. Head over to whitehouse.gov, and you’ll get lovely photo of The One looking like he’s spotted the mother ship, accompanying a solicitation of your email address. Click to enlarge.
His vacant wax statue stare aside, there seem to be two things going on here.
One, President Obama thinks his entire job now is getting re-elected, and he is putting all of the levers of the state that are under his control toward that end. In his mind, whitehouse.gov = barackobama.com. Someone needs to tell him that items like whitehouse.gov are not his campaign property, they belong to the people. The other thing that’s going on here is that this president and his people are perfectly willing to test every limit on their behavior to see if they can get away with it. He will do whatever he thinks he can get away with, “Yes we can!” having been transformed into “Yes he can!” until someone tells him no, he can’t. By the way, if you hit the “No thanks” button you do get to access the WH web site, but it puts a cookie in your browser. And there’s more. If you do agree to sign up, you’re confronted with the following. Click to enlarge.
You’ll get issue-oriented “updates.” How is that anything but blatant electioneering?
Two questions need to be answered. One, where are these harvested emails going? If a single one of them ends up on the Obama campaign’s email list, that’s illegal. If they’re not going to his campaign, where are they going? I can see a scenario where they’re keeping the emails in some official WH list that’s “separate” from the campaign list for the sake of appearances, but in actuality will end up carrying the president’s re-elect message. Message timing and language will end up coinciding with that of the Obama campaign. And, they will have collected some useful information about the voters’ issue priorities via the self-selection, information they can and presumably will hand over to the actual campaign staff.
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