Beneath the glitter of the Obama cabinet picks, the in-between post election, pre inauguration period is also an opportunity to see the underside of the Obama presidency. Coming as it did from the sewer of Illinois and Chicago politics it is not pretty as the Emanuel/Obama team would have us believe.
And now there is another public display of the power of clout (a fine Chicago term) in the presidency. Michelle Malkin focused her definitely warranted suspicious eye on Change.gov, Obama's fund raising, campaign platform site which, post election, has morphed into the official Obama transition and post inaugural site.
[L]ast month that I blogged several questions about the propriety of allowing the perpetual Obama campaign to use a .gov domain name for what appeared to be a fund-raising front. Readers and industry observers noted that the decision appeared to violate General Services Administration rules governing government domains.Guess what? They were right. The FOIA documents sent to Lance O., which he forwarded to me, reveal that the GSA initially rejected Obama’s application for “Change.gov.” On Oct. 21, Peter Alterman, Deputy Associate Administrator of Technology Strategy at the GSA, denied the Obama campaign’s request for a government domain because:
1) It would be a a violation of the government’s naming conventions (too generic); and
2) using ‘change’ in the domain name would be political, since it was the trademark slogan of the Obama campaign.
But hey, rules and regulations be damned once you're a president of change.
The day after the election, on Nov. 5, GSA Chief Information Officer Casey Coleman overruled Alterman after apparently receiving a waiver from Chris Lu, Executive Director of Obama’s Transition Project. As reader Lance discovered through his FOIA request, Ms. Coleman did not elaborate on the granting of this waiver except to say that she had “determined that it is in the best interest of the Federal Government to register the subject domain name.”
As another GSA official who facilitated the convenient change in policy regarding change.gov exulted to the Obama campaign after the domain was granted, “Rock and roll!”
And now the whole country will be subject to Illinois and Chicago politics. Change everything decent about you. Roll and rock!
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