Newshouse Politics

So, the deed is done: Barack Obama is the President-Elect of the United States. Or perhaps whatever is in the nebulous region between President and President-Elect. President-Elect and a Half?

Whatever. For the first time in this country’s truncated history, someone who is not a card-carrying member of the “Old White Man Club” has been elected. Congratulations America, congratulations indeed.

The first round of Hope and Change ™ seems to be contained in BarackO’s new-fangled, 21st Century job application. Red flags fly up like a peregrine falcon tied to a bottle rocket at the sight of the application’s cover:

Ok, so perhaps that isn’t the real cover. But it’s essentially the summarized, fun-size version of the message Obama seeks to send to those who may want to forge careers as Obamanicas. The interesting thing to me is that Obama’s transition truth squad basically has the means to gather this information themselves.

With sources like Google well on the way to becoming all-knowing, sentient robot-creature-thingies, the Obama team would seem to have an easy out to getting all of this info. I suppose the key is transparency and forcing the applicants to come forward with the information themselves….I suppose.

But let’s take a quick glance at one of the fun, silly questions that the President-Elect-and-a-half has folks answering:

Question 58: Please provide the URL address of any websites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

Luckily, since most of the mixed elitists from the Clinton era that make up Obama’s staff seem to have been born before the arrival of Facebook and MySpace, this probably won’t pose as much a problem to those baby-boomers, who still seem to dominate the upper levels of government. Clearly though, anyone who uses these sites to document the savory and unsavory portions of their lives will have to do some severe tinkering.

Also, does this mean that Obama’s people get to know, say, which pornographic websites you frequent, which creationist blogs you troll (or contribute to), and which videos you’ve viewed on YouTube? If so, and if they’re serious about the whole “don’t embarass Obama in any way” thing, I can only come to this conclusion:

No human is qualified to work for Obama. Bring in the robots.