Obama Campaign Website Gets a .gov

I guess the first act wasn't to fire all the U.S. Attorneys...it must have been to fire all the General Counsels.

The new White House website unveiled by President Barack Obama’s team Tuesday includes a shot at former President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Under the “agenda” portion of the site regarding Katrina, it reads: “President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.”

“President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina,” the statement on the site continues. “Citing the Bush Administration’s ‘unconscionable ineptitude’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims.”

The site also points out that Obama “visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region” and worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to help rebuild in the aftermath of Katrina.

In the part of my professional life which just wrapped up, I got to see the inside of the federal government's bureaucratic hand when it came to .gov website's up close a few times.

For the uninformed, all .gov websites are under the control of the General Services Administration.  This agency pretty much acts as the government's general contractor.  They build, contract out, construct, and oversee most government buildings and projects, and have oversight on most government property at the end of the day.

They also have extremely stringent rules when it comes to government websites.  You can post policy, but you can't post what is a blatant partisan attack.  You can post information and a schedule, but it can only be official government actions; nothing regarding a campaign.  Anything else usually means you're going to have a lot of questions in need of answers from agency's Office of the General Counsel (OGC).

Yesterday at the George W. Bush Farewell Ceremony at Andrews AFB, I met the man who was Bush White House Internet Director for most of the second term.  Most of our short conversation was on how the Obama White House was going to get around the wall between politics and government websites.

Our joint conclusion:  They're probably going to ignore those rules until the White House General Counsel tells them otherwise.

It's hard to see after going over the new WhiteHouse.gov how they aren't doing exactly that.