Obama Is Hiring a Twitterer
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
Seriously - what do you notice first? A line on your facebook feed, an alert from your Tweetdeck account, or a thousand-word column on the NYT or White House blogpost exhaustively covering every detail? I would hesitate to say this is in absolutes, but I do feel that the two former two forms of media are /more/ likely to drag an audience to the latter two - it'd exist outside of their range of concerns otherwise.
Obama came into office with promise that he was going to change how things operated, not put simply forward the same old programs (of whatever political stripe). I think that promise is deader than any other. Washington itself could easily be to blame but I think it's clear that government at the speed and transparency of twitter is not going to show up very soon. Predictable - perhaps. Sad - certainly.
What could it help?
Twitter is a communications medium. Which of Obama's problems are due to communications?
I would be for this expenditure if it were likely to involve real communication. Instead, your money will be spent to pander to the proletariat and to oversimplify issues that align with Obama getting re-elected.
From the article: 'The Democratic National Committee’s “social networks manager” job description says the position entails maintaining the President’s accounts on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.'
It's a position paid for by the DNC, not the US Government.
His vacation to Hawaii, for example was estimated to cost $100MM source: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/12/21/the-cost-of-ob...