As a follow-up to my Frum Forum piece of several weeks ago, I’ve been keeping track of items that one might expect on the WH website but are not there. Most of them are interviews. The WH site does include some interviews, so one wonders why it excludes others.
On “This Week,” Vice President Biden made controversial remarks suggesting that the United States could not stop Israel from attacking Iran. He also spoke of economic forecasts:
BIDEN: The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy. The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there.
Everyone thought at that stage — everyone — the bulk of…
STEPHANOPOULOS: CBO would say a little bit higher.
BIDEN: A little bit, but they’re all in the same range. No one was talking about that we would be moving towards — we’re worried about 10.5 percent, it will be 9.5 percent at this point.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But we’re looking at 10 now, aren’t we?
BIDEN: No. Well, look, we’re much too high. We’re at 9 — what, 9.5 right now?
STEPHANOPOULOS: 9.5.
BIDEN: And so the truth is, there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited. Now, that doesn’t — I’m not — it’s now our responsibility. So the second question becomes, did the economic package we put in place, including the Recovery Act, is it the right package given the circumstances we’re in? And we believe it is the right package given the circumstances we’re in.
When Chuck Todd of NBC asked the president if he had “misread” the economy, the president replied:
No, no, no, well I would actually rather than say misread we had incomplete information. We came in January 20th. It was only after the first quarter numbers came in if you recall that suddenly everybody looked and said the economy shrank six percent. So it was happening much more rapidly at an accelerated pace than the projections out there at the time.
See similar comments to ABC’s Jake Tapper.
Although the White House website includes recent interviews with foreign journalists, it includes none of these transcripts.
4 responses so far
1 Oneon1isto // Jul 8, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Have you forwarded your requests onto whitehouse.gov? I know watchdogging is cool and all, but you should try to help them revamp the site. Transparency isn’t just automatically putting everything out there. Transparency is also responding to requests for additional info.
As far as interviews are concerned, I would say that’d be the least likely thing I would put up there, but that’s just me. There’s far more important (and interesting) documentation that could be posted, I am sure, than some interview off ABC where Biden went off his talking points, as he’s want to do.
Additionally, that was on national television. You can find it on YouTube. Hard to be any more transparent than that. Try poking some holes in something they’re actually trying to avoid–but as of right now it just feels like your grasping for straws. You want to say they they’re not transparent but right now there’s no story. Unless you have more examples.
2 jpitney // Jul 9, 2009 at 9:48 am
Thanks for the suggestion. After my original post several weeks ago, I did indeed try to contact the White House people, but they have not responded to my request.
As for additional examples, I have been posting them for weeks at http://www.epicjourney2008.com. Some have involved broadcast interviews, while others have taken more research to locate. There may well be still others that are offline.
Before the current administration, the White House website was a pretty comprehensive source for the president’s public utterances. Now it is less so.
3 Oneon1isto // Jul 9, 2009 at 10:52 am
Thanks for the response John. Will check it out.
No “presidential utterance” APIs yet eh?
One day.
4 Oneon1isto // Jul 9, 2009 at 10:53 am
I really dislike pre-generated emoticons…
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