Reach for the popcorn: Obama opens personal presidential Twitter account Hold on to your hats, Barack Obama has arrived on Twitter in his formal position of President of the United States. The @POTUS account - run by "Dad, husband, and 44th President of the United States" - tweeted earlier this morning and has, so far, managed over half a million followers in an hour or so. Obama follows 65 other …
Well, that opens a whole bag of worms, what if Obama writes posts about the Lakers but the next president is a huge fan of the Clippers? The POTUS will have lots of posts attributed to him about the Lakers, then Chris Paul will be all "yo, President.... you suck, gimme my signed ball back", or something.
Can you even transfer ownership of a Twitter account? I guess the best option will be changing it from @POTUS to @EXPOTUS, though in a few years, oh my, it's never ending.
Sadly this is yet more political misdirection. By law, the President may not directly communicate on the internet without "internal review" and "proxy" which means Barry isn't really directly tweeting, it's an aide or the Secret Service.
There are many reasons for this, but the best reason is that the President might post something in all innocence, that might betray security and put his life or his family's in danger.
There was a great Discovery channel show that discussed POTUS security, even how the President wears a personal LoJack GPS locator strapped and locked to his torso enabling his location to be tracked even inside the White House. The lengths to which the President's life is guarded are extreme and almost draconian.
The reason that Barrack Obama will be "Mr President" in Feb 2017, and the reason why senators, congressmen, ambassadors, committee chairmen, majority/minority leaders etc retain their honorific, is the lack of an honours system. Like or loath the MBE, KB etc, and the Life Peerage, it stops retired, sacked or failed politicos trying to retain status because of what they once did - largely by the public ridicule that would follow such a stunt.
"Despite managing over 500,000 followers in just over an hour, the president has some way to go to reach the other accounts tied to him: @WhiteHouse has six million and @BarackObama has 59 million followers."
Dammit, pick one of those four number formats and stick with it. This isn't The Grauniad.
No matter how you feel about the guy he was the one that wrote the book (along with Howard Dean) on using social networking in campaigning to reach the younger voters, so its not like he is some nub to Twitter. Sadly it seems to be a trend for quite some time that the POTUS are much better at campaigning than governing.
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