About the Timing of Presidential Tweets
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, September 2 2010
A reader takes rightful issue with the idea, first stated by the LA Times and passed along by yours truly in yesterday's cache, that somehow President Obama managed to post four times to Twitter, in the first-person, while similtaneously delivering his speech of Iraq, with not a computing device in sight.
That's not right, it seems. The @BarackObama account, handled by Organizing for America, shows four tweets starting at 8:20pm -- that is, after Obama had wrapped up his brief Oval Office address on Iraq, which had started at eight. Duly noted. Maybe the east coast-west coast time zone discrepency was the problem.
But frankly, in retrospect, the whole thing seems a little silly. Should we be reassured by the notion that the President of the United States could have whipped out his BlackBerry after announcing the end of combat operations and tweeted? Politicians have staff so that they can outsource the particulars of their day-to-day work, driven -- they hope -- by the spirit of their vision and priorities. Why is it considered perfectly kosher for Jon Favreau or another White House speech writer to help craft lines like "I know this historic moment comes at a time of great uncertainty..." and the rest of what came out of the President's mouth during his Oval Office address, and then suddenly decide that having a professional at Organizing for America do the same for his tweets is horribly inauthentic?
Anyway, correction issued.