In a recent Barbara Walters interview, President Elect Barack Obama hinted that he may get to keep his BlackBerry after all.
WALTERS: How are you going to get along without your Blackberry?
OBAMA: (Laughs). This is a problem. I, you know, one of the things that I’m going to have to work through is how to break through the isolation … the bubble that exists around the president. And I’m in the process of negotiating with the Secret Service, with lawyers, with White House staff …
WALTERS: You might have a Blackberry?
OBAMA: Well, I’m, I’m negotiating to figure out how can I get information from outside of the 10 or 12 people who surround my office in the White House. Because, one of the worst things I think that could happen to a president is losing touch with what people are going through day to day.
It doesn’t sound like President Obama will sign any legislation that states the President must carry a BlackBerry on his person at all times into law, however, I am guessing that they are going to work something out…
Was discussed on CNBC today as well. I wonder if they’ll hire a couple of VZW employees to manage the BB server for his device. 🙂
Again…isn’t it so nice that we’re going to have an intelligent, curious President?
Obama is a real President; the one we’ve had has been clueless for the last 8 years, along with most Republicans.
Agreed. I’m a Republican and was on the Obama wagon. Hopefully better times are ahead.
What is wrong with a President that would like to be informed, active, and communicating with people? If the president can be addicted to Blackberry, so can I~!
That is a fantastic idea, a president who is on hand with the people’s day to day activities is an effective president so why deprive him of his Blackberry?
They deprive the President of their BB for security issues. What real world decisions would a President make with their BB that they couldn’t without a BB? To think a President micromanages things is a bit off touch.
And to think any president we’ve had isn’t intelligent is so far from reality. you don’t go to any Ivy League school and graduate without having intelligence. A Presidents legacy is based on decisions made from the intelligence they are given (they do very little independent research). As long as they have the right “gut” feeling, they’ll have a great legacy. Do you seriously think Bush is too dumb to understand his opinions aren’t liked? He knows, he just feels his decisions are the correct ones. Doesn’t mean he isn’t intelligent.
WHO CARES?!
Not to get into a full bore political debate, but yes, john, I do think Bush is dumb, relative to most Presidents.
He got into an Ivy League school based on his last name, and that’s really why he became President.
As for “gut feeling” I’ll take a President who makes decisions more on thought and reasoning, like Obama does.
As for intelligence, Bush had ample opportunity to get the right intelligence…he and his staff just ignored it.
Finally, I do think Bush is probably an OK person, but was in way over his head being President, and has been easily manipulated by certain people in his administration.
Which brings us back to Obama, who will be a major upgrade as President, largely because he thinks. In fact, it’s so nice that we will have a President who actually speaks in complete sentences.
Somebody refresh my memory…did Obama carry all “57 or 58” states?
Agreed. I’m a Republican and was on the Obama wagon. Hopefully better times are ahead. http://www.canon-battery-charger.net
To think that Bush did not perform well is to be plain dumb….Let’s see our people are safer because of Bush, the problems we are currently seing in the economy are due to bad judgement by the Clinton presidency thinking that all Americans should own a home and pushing the banks to follow this lead. Remember it was policy made during the Clinton era that encouraged a bank to allow a person making $35K to purchase a home worth $800K. How dumb is that!!!! Bush’s legacy will be remember when the Middle East becomes a safe, progresive and developed area and people have a higher standard of living and are free. When people are free to pray for any supreme being and women are treated with a greater respect. So the liberals think he has been dead wrong, but in 50 years the world will see it different!!!!
Along with ‘Thought’, I’m not going to get into it too much either, but want to put my 2 cents in…and I’m a Republican for the record.
First off, the issues that we are currently dealing with can go back to Alan Greenspan being appointed to his position as Fed Chairman during the Reagan administration back in 1987 (BTW…Reagan is my all time favorite). During the Clinton administration, while some restrictions were lifted toward the end of his tenure, the majority of those issues that we deal with today were done via the Bush administration to pull us out of the dot com era and 9/11. Much is also to be blamed on Wall Street. Giving out loans to those that cannot afford them at the bottom level, both mortgage and credit, and then ‘package’ them in paper (commercial paper is one example) is insane. The Bush administration simply read the economy incorrectly, among many other things. It’s all catching up.
As for Bush being intelligent…I don’t see it. A ‘C’ student at Yale (and second fiddle to John Kerry who also attended Yale at the same time for one year…not to mention a movie about him by his former classmate Oliver Stone…how flattering), and only there due to his fathers legacy and name is why he has the school on his resume. He is not articulate, his presentation questionable among world leaders, and I doubt Obama will choke on a pretzel (sorry, I just had to). And to further the debate…Bush has created a bad vibe in the world about the US when he once had the world and it’s attention in the palm of his hand back in 2001. He abused the attention of the world that was given to him and distorted its opinion of us as a nation. Iraq is a simple answer to the attempt on his fathers life. Weapons of mass destruction…you’ve got to be kidding me. We lost sight of the reason why we’re over in the region…Afganistan. He’s practically ignored the response of capturing Bin Laden, lowering the focus while he tries to clean up the mess in Iraq. His approach of pushing US policy upon other countries to adapt is offending. We sure as hell wouldn’t accept that as a nation from outside countries. And the Republican party is having a tough time separating Church and State. I was all for the McCain of 2000, not 2008, and the choice of Palin pretty much cemented my opinion of the Republican party’s path down the wrong road. I think he believes that too since he personally wanted to go with Lieberman.
I wish there was a way to bring back Reagan as I was too young to vote for him back then, but for now I’m certainly satisfied with who we’ll have in office. He’s articulate, intelligent, and won’t beat around the ‘Bush’.
There is a reason why BBs or other electronic devices aren’t allowed in or around the White House. He may be a “hip” president-elect (he’s not the president yet folks) but that doesn’t mean anything.
What it does show is that he apparently doesn’t have any clue what kind of security issue this is going to cause nor does he understand the “cyber” world.
Another scary thought is that he wants to get information from outside the 10 or 12 people. What kind of information does he think he’s going to get?
Oh, and if he’s going to be on his BB all the time then apparently he thinks he’s going to have too much free time on his hands. I think he has much more important things to be focusing on than getting his precious BB and possibly a laptop.
First off, who knows if Obama will really get to keep his BB? I think that will come down to a host of issues, including security, privacy, etc.
What Obama really said in the statement quoted above, which is very admirable, is that he wants to break through that “bubble” that people in power often get trapped in, whereby they just get a narrow range of information from a relatively small group of people. I think this is indeed one of the huge problems with Bush; he is trapped in a bubble of narrow thinking fed to him by a few people.
It’s very easy to get trapped inside that kind of bubble when you are in a position of power, esp. the POTUS.
I think one of the great things about Obama is that he actually uses his intellect, and realizes these truths. He also loves to surround himself with a diverse group of people who will always challenge his thinking, rather than simply reinforce it.
Obama’s the real deal, and we’ll see what a refreshing difference it will be to have a President who believes in using thought and reason as his guide.
If you want to educate yourself on what really drove our policy with regard to Iraq (not to mention a good deal of our foreign policy over the last 35 years), read “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein. It is eye opening…..
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
Maybe if Bush had had a Blackberry, he wouldn’t have so casually ignored all of those warnings about the subprime mortgage crisis in 2005 and 2006. The sad thing is that the more the truth comes out about everything…the economic crisis, Iraq, etc…the more we realize that Bush had the information available to him to avert disaster…yet most likely the people in his administration probably never even brought it to his attention, and he was too intellectually lazy to care.
Any facts that did reach Bush he probably casually dismissed with his ideologically simplistic bent.
The warnings were there, we just had an administration that ignored them.
Thanks goodness that in Obama we’ll have someone with a probing intellect and curiosity, who wants to get the truth and isn’t afraid of complex thinking.