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I saw the following tweet come through from the White House:

Fresh photo: Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton in the Situation Room http://bit.ly/3ZqQ8k

Okay now something just I don't know caught my eye and felt off about that. Are Ex-Presidents frequently invited into the situation room?  Maybe it is all the West Wing I watched but it always seemed to me like the situation room is where the rubber meets the road in terms of a president making decisions.  I just find it interesting with all the talk about Bill Clinton's role, etc. that the White House would want this image out there. Obama is the president sure but this is going to drive people crazy I think as they wonder is Bill Clinton Obama's Dick Cheney? What exactly is his role? To what extent does he have influence of policy, decisions, etc? I think it is important to know these things.  Take a look at the photo and judge for yourself:

There's a line from my favorite movie, The American President, that's always stuck with me and I usually point to when I'm describing who I'd want my president to operate.

The other piece of legislation is the crime bill. As of today, it no longer exists. I'm throwing it out. I'm throwing it out and writing a law that makes sense. You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and hand guns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I'm gonna convince Americans that I'm right, and I'm gonna get the guns.

There's a few reasons why I admire this approach but what it comes down to is ownership of the position, belief, principle. Take a stand, know you are right, and then convince the American people you're right even if you have to for example go door to door.

Over the last few weeks some have been attacking Obama for his allegedly mishandling of the stimulus bill, etc. However I would disagree it seems to me that President Obama has decided to take a book out of President Shepherd's play book and has been attempting to convince the American people that he's right and persuade them to come around to his position.

It's easy understand why this is alarming to some because for so long we've been entrenched in ideology and there hasn't really been a true debate on the merits of ideas and policy in this country for quite a while. In fact we've reached a point in this country where people become very defensive when their ideas are challenged and they tend to take what is really just an attempt at debate and dialogue as a personal attack. President Obama knows full well that not everyone is going to agree with him but that isn't the point, the point is that he's standing by what he believes is the best course of the action for the country and attempting to sell that to the American people.

Hopefully President Obama's approach is going to raise the level of public discourse in this country and we can get back to a place were we judge ideas and policies on the basis of the merits and whether they have an opportunity to work and to help people. This would be in sharp contrast to what we've seen as more of the same from the republicans in the Senate (once lauded as the worlds greatest deliberative body) as the attempt to score the same old tired political points and bandi about things like tax cuts and pork. Funny though they never seem willing to engage in an actual debate over how many jobs for example upgrading ATV trails might create. Those are the terms that President Obama has been trying to fame this debate within not scoring political points and counting up "pork."

I'm certainly curious to see how this approach evolves over the course of the Obama presidency will he for example leverage his supporter databases, social networks, etc. to engage citizens to literally go door to door for him. If the establishment is scared now they should be terrified at that prospect, that's the watershed moment.

This approach is part of the change that President Obama promised to try to effect. Will it happen at the wave of a wand and suddenly the way our government fundamentally operates will change completely? Of course not but this is how it starts folks, one conversation, one debate, one idea, one blog post at a time. Yes we Can.

Since news broke that President Obama was going to nominate Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) to the cabinet position of Commerce Secretary everyone has been asking me my thoughts, you know being the astute NH political observer that I am...HA! Well here are my thought's anyways.

Initially I was disappointed by Governor John Lynch not showing a little more backbone and maybe standing up for the Democratic party in his own state, of which he claims to be a member, and saying you know what no I'm not going to turn my back on the state party even if you are Barack Obama. However as I've though about it that wouldn't really be a feasible option for Lynch as he needs to do whatever he can to win the good graces (read: stimulus money) of Barack Obama. Particularly since most in the state are pretty certian Lynch can balance the budget with out that additional money.

My thoughts then turned to Representative Paul Hodes (D-NH) and Representative Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) both of whom have been expressing greater interest in running for Gregg's seat in the Senate, how would this appointment affect those plans? Before the actual appointment had been announced by Lynch I thought it would be a cunning political move by Gregg to demand that Lynch appoint recently defeated John E. Sununu. In that scenario Lynch's career would be over regardless of what he did appoint Sununu and your own party would want blood, don't appoint Sununu and you're essentially slapping the incredibly popular President, a member of your part, in the face by denying him his pick for Commerce Secretary (Gregg said he'd only accept if the balance of power in the Senate didn't change). As it turns out Lynch decided to appoint J. Bonnie Newman, a loyal Gregg devotee, to the vacant seat. Hodes has now offically announced his campaign and in all likelihood the Democrats may have a much better shot at Newman who'll only be warming the seat for a year than they would have at Gregg, although I think he was vulnerable as well.

Perhaps my favorite part of all this are the two pieces of trivia below from MSNBC:

2. New Hampshire will become the FOURTH state to currently have two female senators: (Washington, California and Maine do now)

3. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) will, after only 30 days in office, become the SENIOR Senator from New Hampshire. As Senate Historical Office's Betty Koed points out, with that new title comes the privilege of getting the coveted Daniel Webster Senate desk. By law, the senior senator from NH gets to use the desk!

Yeah that's right, the Senior Senator from New Hampshire is by Senate rule entitled to the Daniel Webster desk!!! Which I just find awesome.  Hopefully this will put to rest any argument over whether Webster is New Hampshire's son (though that was never truly in doubt) or Massachusetts'.

There was a good deal of coverage (Washington Post, Fastcompany) in the first few days of the Obama administration of the tech woes experienced by tech savvy Mac wielding incoming White House staffers. Imagine the horror of those former Mac users arriving in a West Wing to old desktop PCs running Windows 2000 and XP. That might send this Mac user screaming and running the other way. Much has been made of all the bureaucracy getting in the way of something, most Americans take for granted these days, sending an e-mail. I also read somewhere that laptops are in short supply because only "certain" people get laptops...uh...what? What is that security through "chained to your deskness"? Much has been made of the requirements that all communications that occur in the West Wing, by staffers, etc. be archived and preserved for history. In my mind all of this boils down to a matter of two issues: technology and policy or regulation. Put another way the how and the why.

Let's tackle the how first. It seems to me that a few technical solutions would meet most archiving requirements. Start with the network topology. What I'd do is essentially create a great wall of the West Wing. In other words you want to route all traffic through a single point which of course makes it quite easy to put a device in the chain that simply archives each 1 and 0 passing through it for the benefit of future historians. Or maybe you might even route that traffic over a secured link directly to the National Archives. This should solve the issues within the West Wing offices wifi, network, etc. route it all through one place and you don't have to worry about laptop or desktop. As far as IM it seems to me that there are several solutions there used in corporate environments which could be configured to log conversations on the server side, etc. Lastly I would mandate all "company" e-mail is sent through a particular server and things could be logged there on the server side as well. With some regulations and fines, etc. for thoese who are found to bypass offical channels. I guess my point here is that everything could be done on the server or network topology side which should lessen the burden on having to configure clients and make things platform agnostic.  In the end if all of these methods fail then can't we still fall back on the NSA? I mean after all they're already logging the rest of America's traffic why should the Americans inhabiting the White House be any exception?

The question remains though what exactly are all these regulations that mandate archival of every character produced by an administration proving anyways? Just because it might the technically possible to archive every bit the administration produces does it make sense to do so? If the West Wing is like any other office it seems to me that what you'll end up with after four years is a couple thousand e-mails that are something to the effect of "In late today. -Rahm ." Well thank god we have that archived away for future generations serious historical significance there.

The bottom line here is this, if it is truly as hard to send an e-mail from the center of the free world as we've been lead to believe then something is very wrong and needs to change. If the regulations make it that difficult those regulations need to go it's that simple. If it's the technology then I am absolutely confident those issues can be overcome as well.

In the end how can our government really be "of the people, by the people, and for the people" if they have to communicate with each other (and US) like some kind of prehistoric primates?