When You're The President-Elect, People Watch Your Website Closely

from the you-can't-just-rewrite-history dept

There’s been plenty of coverage about President-Elect Obama’s change.gov website, which we recently mentioned as well. However, there’s already some controversy brewing, as some folks have noticed that when the site launched, it had full versions of various policy initiatives. Over the weekend, though, many of those initiatives disappeared completely. Of course, it wasn’t that completely, since plenty of folks were able to dig up copied versions of them and repost them.

Chances are that this is nothing more than a similar flare up a couple months ago, when Obama’s campaign moved some of the content on his campaign website around, pushing more of the policy details into PDFs rather than in the main HTML. In fact, the campaign has suggested just that, by saying that the policy section is being “retooled.” However, it should be a clear reminder to folks working on the website that people are watching every move extremely closely, and they’re not going to be able to make changes and hope no one notices.

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Comments on “When You're The President-Elect, People Watch Your Website Closely”

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37 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Likely being retooled and redrafted since its content was merely a copy of the campaign site. Noteworthy, though, is that at least one “policy” concerning public service went from a mandate to a “goal”. Hopefully the same will happen for many of the other policies that appeared on the campaign site. Even better, perhaps some will be renunciated.

Anonymous Coward says:

did every1 forget that whats said during election campaigns and what actually happens during the term being served (regardless if its presidential or not) are seldom related?

This guy made history already.

– Youngest US Pres.
– 1st Black US Pres.
I think he was 1st black man to be on the senate as well (but don’t quote me on this)

the only thing left for him to do is boost the US economy after all isn’t that what democrats usually do?

NoWonderWereInTrouble says:

Post #10 by A/C

You must be one of those no-knowledge voters who supported Obama. You don’t have to know anything, you just have to believe in hopenchange.

The youngest President was Teddy Roosevelt at 42, and second-youngest was JFK at 43. The first Black Senator was named Hiram Revels, and he was elected in 1870.

Do a little research before spouting nonsense masquerading as “fact”.

cockroach says:

no archive

this website (change.gov) appears to be unavailable on the wayback machine (archive.org), a.k.a. the internet archive. the site could be too new, i don’t know when it was made, or they may have blocked their site from scanning using a robot .txt header in the html. who knows? it’s just hard as hell to squeeze any actual information from a politician’s website.

moil4gold-49 says:

Are These The Same?

Are the people who detected and raised the alert over the policy removal at Change.org the same people who were saying:

“Who is Obama? We barely know this guy? What are his policies, why won’t he tell us? He’s just a good speaker followed by Obamaniacs like he’s the second coming.”

Funny that the right can both criticize Obama, the author of two autobiographical books, for being a veiled cipher, even as they criticize him for taking down his campaign policy ideas on one of his official websites. I guess now they are finally admitting that he had policies as well as being a great orator, right?

more…

He was born in Kenya. He was born in Indonesia.

He is a muslim. His christian preacher is a wacko.

I love the way the mud slung at Obama cancels itself out. You guys need to have some pre-meetings on the lies you want to throw up. You would have had more success.

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