During the 2008 campaign, Obama pledged to have the most transparent administration ever. This was one of the first promises he broke by not posting bills to the web for a full five days before he signed them.

It appears, he is also not as transparent with his digital media prowess as the administration claimed:

Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I noticed that young people — they’re very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.

Is this a major deal? Kind of. When you run your campaign on the premise that you’re the most amazing thing to happen to the Internet since Al Gore, you open yourself to criticism in the future, especially when your campaign was lauded for being an early adopter of the technology in question.

Sarah Granger at TechPresident opines:

Meanwhile, I expect we’ll see more hoopla about Barack Obama not using Twitter, even though his campaign never asserted that he did himself. So far about half of the follow-up tweets on the #obamacn hashtag are RT’s about the admission and the other half is people responding that they never thought he was tweeting. Are 50% of Twitter users really that surprised?

Yep, actually Sarah we are surprised. For a number of reasons.

First, remember all of the media attention about Obama refusing to give up his BlackBerry and the NSA having to build a super-deluxe-ultimately-secure version of software? That kind of negates Obama’s comment about thumbs and makes you question if he fully understand exactly what Twitter is. If you are addicted to a BlackBerry, how do you not have the skills to tweet? Same device and skill set. It’s also possible to use Twitter on a computer. Tweetdeck anyone?

Secondly, as James Richardson at RedState recalls, the Obama team released an add attacking McCain for not using technology. While the McCain camp deserved to be flogged for their lack of enagaging the interwebs, John McCain actually tweets every day. As Top of the Ticket points out, he has nearly 1.6 million followers. RedState notes:

President Obama’s admission of his unfamiliarity of the internet tool de jour would have been an altogether innocuous acknowledgment that the President is, well, old, were it not for the dogged efforts of his campaign apparatus in portraying the young then-Senator Obama as hip and tech savvy opposite the old and inaccessible Senator John McCain.

Had the campaign not made such a big deal out of this, Obama’s statements would not be news. After all, I would prefer a president to do actual work (like decide on an Afghanistan policy) rather than tweeting the awesomeness of his lunch or deets from the last basketball game. In the end, it is ironic that John McCain is the more techno-saavy person here. I’m hardly surprised. This is just further proof of the dog-and-pony show that makes up the entire administration. How many times have there been claims that Obama had the talent and ability to handle something, and then we discovered otherwise?

This does touch on an emerging social media issue. How transparent should you be with tweets?

Some politicans take to Twitter. In addition to McCain, TweetCongress tracts what our Congressmen and Sentators are capturing in 140 characters or less. However, I’ve had numerous strategists and Hill staffers tell me that very few members actually tweet for themselves. In one case that surprised me, the scheduler sends out tweets for the member based on the schedule for the day.

Since most Congressional members use Twitter as a mini-press release vehicle, this isn’t a big deal. However, when tweets are about events in your home district, and your scheduler back in DC is sending them, that’s a transparency issue. As social media becomes more standard, I hope that elected and wannabe-electeds opt for more honesty. I find tweets from a staffer just as interesting as the candidate/member. It’s not a bad thing to attribute who’s tweeting. As someone who is addicted to Twitter and has tweeted professionally for a couple of jobs, be transparent. It’s appreciated.

Tags: John McCain, Obama, RedState, social media, TechPresident, Top of the Ticket, TweetCongress, twitter

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