The High Cost of White House Outreach
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, September 23 2009
Andrew Breitbart is providing a master class in how online activists can set their political opponent's agenda. Days after Breitbart's BigGovernment.com drove Congress, the U.S. Census Bureau, and local Democrats to admonish ACORN, shaking confidence in the progressive group that registers voters, gives low-income Americans housing guidance, and provides field staff for Democratic candidates, the blog has rattled another favored target of the right: the National Endowment for the Arts. The White House is now conceding that an August 10th conference call involving the NEA, artists, and representatives from the White House's public engagement arm -- seemingly targeted at advancing Obama's political agenda by extending the creative relationship with artists that began during the 2008 presidential campaign -- was boneheadedly inappropriate. By just about any measure, it's been a successful launch for the two-week old blog.
What might be, from Breitbart's perspective, an added cherry on top is how, in addition to drawing into question ACORN and the National Endowment of the Arts, the White House response gives anyone in the Obama Administration pause before they use what had been considered an institutional strength: the organizing power of the Internet. On the August NEA planning call, an agency spokesperson already expressed trepidation about how the executive branch (of which the NEA is part) could, legally, use the web and social media to connect the arts community with government:
This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand-new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government, what that looks like legally. We're still trying to figure out the laws of putting government Web sites on Facebook and the use of Twitter. This is all being sorted out. We are participating in history as it's being made. So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely and we can really work together to move the needle and to get -- to get stuff done. (emphasis added)
ABC News Jake Tapper reports that the White House is working on a set of guidelines to make sure that something like the NEA call never happens again. Stay tuned to see if those rules also circumscribe how the Obama Administration's public engagement efforts can use social media and the rest of the web.