Obama Wants Applicants’ Web-Posting Past
After you Mr President Elect!
(CNET) If you want a job in an Obama administration, be prepared to disclose every blog post or comment you’ve ever written.
A nine-page questionnaire requires applicants to list — and if possible, provide copies of — all “posts or comments on blogs or other Web sites” they have ever made. Also required are “aliases” or nicknames used on those sites.
Translated into English, this means that President-elect Obama wants to know far more about you than his predecessors did. That requirement would force applicants to disclose information about Facebook and MySpace pages, profiles posted on dating Web sites, and even what was posted on Web sites like CNET and YouTube that allow readers to append comments.
Note that question doesn’t only ask for potentially embarrassing or incendiary posts. It wants a list of “each” one.
It also asks for the URLs of “any Web sites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity,” and suggests MySpace and Facebook by name as examples. Dating sites like match.com would be included, too.
Perhaps this won’t be a problem for older Democrats vying for senior positions like treasury secretary or attorney general. But for today’s Facebook-and-YouTube generation, requesting a list (and, “if readily available,” a copy) of all Web site posts and comments the applicant ever made is not a trivial task to complete — and means that the Obama administration may not be quite as tech-savvy as its reputation would indicate.
These and other questions seem to represent Obama’s plan to avoid the the Lani Guinier Effect. President Clinton appointed Guinier as assistant attorney general, and then was forced to withdraw her nomination in the face of severe criticism. Clinton claimed at the time that he had not read her writings favoring racial quotas.