Wired White House

In his weekly address, President Obama discusses the impact of the Recovery Act on recent GDP numbers and the New Foundation. He sees innovation as a key piece of that New Foundation. Here's what the President had to say about employment, a lagging economic indicator:

But history shows that you need to have economic growth before you have job growth.  And the report yesterday on our economy is an important sign that we’re headed in the right direction.  Business investment, which had been plummeting in the past few months, is showing signs of stabilizing.  This means that eventually, businesses will start growing and hiring again.  And that’s when it will really feel like a recovery to the American people.

And innovation:

Innovation has been essential to our prosperity in the past, and it will be essential to our prosperity in the future. But it is only by building a new foundation that we will once again harness that incredible generative capacity of the American people. All it takes are the policies to tap that potential – to ignite that spark of creativity and ingenuity – which has always been at the heart of who we are and how we succeed. At a time when folks are experiencing real hardship, after years in which we have seen so many fail to take responsibility for our collective future, it’s important to keep our eyes fixed on that horizon.

Watch the whole thing for yourself:

In his weekly YouTube address, President Obama talks about all the new consumer protections and financial regulations he introduced this week, and highlights especially the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  As Obama described it, the new agency is "charged with just one job: looking out for the interests of ordinary Americans in the financial system."

Joe Nocera commented on the new regulations in a column this week, and took a relatively dim view of the President's plans, saying the President doesn't come close to what F.D.R. accomplished as he fought the Great Depression:

Wall Street hated the reforms, of course, but Roosevelt didn’t care. Wall Street and the financial industry had engaged in practices they shouldn’t have, and had helped lead the country into the Great Depression. Those practices had to be stopped. To the president, that’s all that mattered...

Rather, the Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself. Without question, the latter would be more difficult, more contentious and probably more expensive. But it would also have more lasting value.

Paul Krugman painted a slightly more generous picture, who says Obama's new regulations close many important loopholes, but don't go far enough.

But don't take my word for it, watch Obama give his address here:

In his address this week, President Barack Obama focused on one of the two major reform measures currently being debated in Congress: Health Care. Facing dual challenges of cutting costs and expanding coverage, Obama had this to say about the necessity of health care reform:

I'm talking about the families I've met whose spiraling premiums and out-of-pocket expenses are pushing them into bankruptcy or forcing them to go without the check-ups or prescriptions they need.  Business owners who fear they’ll be forced to choose between keeping their doors open or covering their workers.  Americans who rightly worry that the ballooning costs of Medicare and Medicaid could lead to fiscal catastrophe down the road.

Simply put, the status quo is broken.  We cannot continue this way.  If we do nothing, everyone’s health care will be put in jeopardy.  Within a decade, we’ll spend one dollar out of every five we earn on health care – and we’ll keep getting less for our money.

That’s why fixing what’s wrong with our health care system is no longer a luxury we hope to achieve – it’s a necessity we cannot postpone any longer.

Watch the whole thing for yourself:

Shortly after the presidential election in an interview with MSNBC, Simon predicted that President Obama's weekly addresses and other important remarks would be translated into different languages for a global audience interested in what Barack Hussein Obama has to say:

Rosenberg said it will be common for government agencies to host videos and blogs (as the Transportation Security Administration does already).

"You're going to see competition at the weekly Cabinet meeting between the DHS secretary and the HHS secretary over who had more views on their YouTube video, and who had more comments on their blog," he said.

Global Webcasting of presidential addresses and press briefings - perhaps translated into multiple languages - is likely to become routine. That policy could well filter down to other governmental agencies and even other governments, Rosenberg said.

He pointed to the example of David Cameron, the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, who stars in a series of "Webcameron" videos that touch upon his party's policies as well as his personal life. "You can watch videos of him washing dishes in his sink," Rosenberg said.

Fast forward to today and Obama's historic speech at the University of Cairo in Egypt. According to CNN:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (CNN) — Some of the new media tools that helped propel President Obama to the White House are going to get their first test run on the international stage Thursday, when he delivers a long-awaited speech to the Muslim world.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said administration officials are planning to use text messaging and social networking sites like Facebook to help engage the world, especially young people, during and after the speech in Cairo.

Gibbs said the goal is to "not only draw people in to see the speech but to have them discuss it as well" to keep the conversation going long after the actual speech is delivered.

For example, the U.S. State Department is planning to send text messages about Obama's speech to users worldwide who sign up at www.america.gov. The texts will be sent out in four languages — Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English — and will enable users "to reply and give feedback" in real time, according to Gibbs.

The White House, which usually sends out transcripts of presidential speeches in English, will release the transcript in 13 different languages this time around.

Administration officials estimate that there are 20 million users of Facebook in the Arab countries and are setting up live chats on that site in order to get a conversation going online.

As the CNN article notes, the speech was texted out in four languages spoken in countries with large Muslim populations: Arabic, Persian, Urdu (the literary language of Pakistan and spoken widely in India) and English. The speech transcript was released in 13 languages.

Now check out the new Web site -- america.gov. It's truly fascinating and I believe it could go a long way in improving America's global standing after eight years of arrogance and confrontation. You can visit an Arab-language version of america.gov, a Spanish-language version, a French version, Persian, Mandarin and more. Although I couldn't read all of the languages, I could discern that each version of america.gov has some different content targeted toward viewers in each country. For example, the Spanish-language Web site had pictures from Sectretary of State Hillary Clinton's delegation to the inauguration of El Salvador's new president.  

Clinton has tapped Alec Ross, who has written a paper with Simon and appeared at NDN several times, to implement the Department of State's digital diplomacy. Not surprisingly, Clinton recently recorded a YouTube address about the new tools and media that State is using to reach out to the rest of the world (scroll back up to what Simon said in his interview about Cabinet members recording YouuTube videos).

Two days after the presidential election, Simon posted a vlog with his prediction about how Obama would no doubt use his campaign's new tools arsenal and apply it to governing. There have been some hiccups along the way, but using social networking, texting, Web video -- all tools that we at NDN have strongly advocated for years in our New Tools Series -- is no doubt improving America's relationship with the rest of the world.

Watch Simon's vlog on how Obama will reivent the presidency here:

As our fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais wrote about earlier this week, President Obama signed into law on Tuesday the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. Here's an excerpt from their take on the act; they wrote that it

...represents a major redemption of candidate Obama’s promise to offer his most loyal and largest constituency, Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, a chance to serve their country at the community level and in return earn assistance with the cost of their college education.

Not everyone is ready to join hands and sing the praises of the concept, however. While [the bill] enjoyed bipartisan sponsorship in both the Senate and the House, that didn’t prevent a majority of Republicans from voting against the bill on final passage. They complained that the bill was “too expensive” and would crowd out pure volunteer work with program participants receiving a modicum of financial support for their efforts from the federal government. In the House, 149 of 175 Republicans voted “no,” joined by 19 of their colleagues in the Senate, including the party's two top leaders. With all Democrats voting in favor of [the bill], the core of the Republican’s “Just say no” caucus demonstrated how out of touch with the Millennial Generation they are.

Of those Republicans expressing their opposition in the Senate, only one, John Ensign of Nevada, was from a state that Obama carried. Even though both Republican Senators from such bright red states as Utah, Georgia and Mississippi could see the potential value of increasing the number of volunteers and college students in the country’s civic life, both GOP Senators from South Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Idaho made it clear that there were no circumstances under which their hostility to government could be softened by the merits of a patriotic cause.

As Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina put it on his Web site, "We need to recognize that this bill does represent a lot of what's wrong with our federal government today.... civil society works, because it is everything that government is not. It's small, it's personal, it's responsible, it's accountable.” And Louisiana Senator David Vitter spuriously argued, “This new federal bureaucracy would, in effect, politicize charitable activity around the country." Echoing Governor Sarah Palin’s horribly off key comment at her party’s convention last August that “the world isn’t a community and it doesn’t need an organizer,” these Republicans demonstrated just how out of touch they are with Millennial thinking.

I wholeheartedly agree with Morley and Mike that members of my generation are lookings for ways to do good for our country (and others) - in fact, many are frustrated with how difficult it is to find something worthwhile to do after graduating, particularly since monetary compensation is often a secondary or tertiary concern. Lucikly, President Obama understands the way that we millennials operate - if we want to go get a drink after work, for example, we might be more inclined to check out dchappyhours.com for specials first. So the Obama administration has launched a new Web site, Serve.gov, to help unite people with service opportunities that match their interests and passions.

Serve.gov is wonderful in its simplicity. It asks you what you're interested in, and where you want to be working, and that's it - the engine searches all posted entries that match your critera. It searches entries posted on Serve.gov itself, as well as on all of these partner sites:

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist (and a supporter of NDN) was on hand at the signing. Here's what he had to say about the act, and the new site (courtesy of TechPresident):

Many people want to fully dedicate themselves to service, they're troops, teachers, social workers, cops, and all manner of public servants. We should remember the nobility of the public service they perform.

Me, I spend a lot of every day performing customer service and see real human behavior. I see, every day, that Americans are eager to help out, particularly the millennial youth, maybe the new "civic generation."

Serve America provides means for those who want to fully engage, like by seriously increasing support for Americorps, increasing the number of participants from 75,000 positions annually to 250,000...

...Serve America also provides for Serve.gov, a new Web 2.0-style government site that brings together service opportunities from a number of sources. It's genuinely innovative, especially in allowing any organization to create its listing on the site, building on top of the Network for Good platform.

Coming from Mr. Newmark, that is high praise - and it seems like this will have a much higher chance of success than "missed connections."

Dan has written extensively about Twitter in his weekly Thursday New Tools feature. From talking to friends or colleagues, my sense is that you either love Twitter or you hate it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of inbetweet.

Last night, I happened upon this recent New York Times article on Twitter, "Putting Twitter's World to Use."  

My first reaction to Twitter was lukewarm: I'm not so interested in a 140-character verbal tweet about what someone is eating for breakfast.

But like many new tools and media, Twitter is evolving. To wit:

According to the article:

Companies like Starbucks, Whole Foods and Dell can see what their customers are thinking as they use a product, and the companies can adapt their marketing accordingly. Last week in Moldova, protesters used Twitter as a rallying tool while outsiders peered at their tweets to help them understand what was happening in that little-known country.

And over the weekend, Amazon.com learned how important it was to respond to the Twitter audience. After one author noticed that Amazon had reclassified books with gay and lesbian themes as “adult” and removed them from the main search and sales rankings, a protest broke out on blogs and Twitter. The company felt compelled to respond despite the Easter holiday, initially saying the problem was due to a “glitch in our system” but later blaming a “ham-fisted cataloging error” that affected more than 57,000 books dealing with health and sex.

Soon, machines could twitter as much as people. Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering selling the product.

Pairing sensors with Twitter leads some to think Twitter could be used to send home security alerts or tell doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. In the aggregate, such real-time data streams could aid medical researchers.

Already doctors use Twitter to ask for help and share information about procedures. At Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, surgeons and residents twittered throughout a recent operation to remove a brain tumor from a 47-year-old man who has seizures.

And more:

Indeed, the news-gathering promise of Twitter was most evident during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November and when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River in January. People were twittering from the scenes before reporters arrived.

...Even small businesses find Twitter useful. For example, Mary F. Jenn, of True Massage and Wellness in San Francisco, twitters when masseuses have same-day openings in their schedules and offers discounts. The spa is often fully booked within several hours.

But Twitter’s most productive use has been for businesses that want to peer into the minds of their customers, reading their immediate reactions to a product. Dell noticed customers complaining on Twitter that the apostrophe and return keys were too close together on the Dell Mini 9 laptop. So Dell fixed the problem on the Dell Mini 10.

New technologies are fascinating often because of the way people learn to adapt them across so many situations -- twittering in Moldova to come to a protest, Facebooking to organize in Egypt, avoiding crushing fees when sending money home to another contient by doing it on a cell phone. As Simon wrote this morning, the Obama Administration is using mobile technology as it seeks to advance democracy and an open society in Cuba.

And as Tom Kalil wrote for NDN affiliate the New Policy Institute in an enormously compelling paper last year, "...the explosive growth of mobile communications can be a powerful tool for addressing some of the most critical challenges of the 21st century, such as promoting vibrant democracies, fostering inclusive economic growth, and reducing the huge inequities in life expectancy between rich and poor nations."

New tools, new technologies, new opportunities.

President Barack Obama, aboard Air Force One, speaks this week on the need for global cooperation and explains his overseas trip to the American people. He begins with the now-familiar, but still excellent refrain on global interconnectivity.

In this new century, we live in a world that has grown smaller and more interconnected than at any time in history. Threats to our nation’s security and economy can no longer be kept at bay by oceans or by borders drawn on maps. The terrorists who struck our country on 9/11 plotted in Hamburg, trained in Kandahar and Karachi, and threaten countries across the globe. Cars in Boston and Beijing are melting ice caps in the Arctic that disrupt weather patterns everywhere. The theft of nuclear material from the former Soviet Union could lead to the extermination of any city on earth. And reckless speculation by bankers in New York and London has fueled a global recession that is inflicting pain on workers and families around the world and across America.

The challenges of our time threaten the peace and prosperity of every single nation, and no one nation can meet them alone. That is why it is sometimes necessary for a President to travel abroad in order to protect and strengthen our nation here at home. That is what I have done this week.

Take a look at the whole address:

Also, Obama's town hall in Strasbourg yesterday, following a surprisingly successful G-20 summit, was pretty amazing, both in itself and its symbolism of a new era of American leadership. His tone and policy prescriptions are right on the mark. Read Simon's blog about it and the politics of bottom-up going global.

President Obama used his video this week to address the flooding in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and to highlight the themes of effective government combined with individual service and responsibility. First, Obama detailed what his Administration is doing to respond to the crisis:

Even as we face an economic crisis which demands our constant focus, forces of nature can also intervene in ways that create other crises to which we must respond – and respond urgently. For the people of North and South Dakota and Minnesota who live along rivers spilling over their banks, this is one such moment.

Rivers and streams throughout the region have flooded or are at risk of flooding. The cities of Fargo and neighboring Moorhead are vulnerable as the waters of the Red River have risen. Thousands of homes and businesses are threatened.

That is why, on Tuesday, I granted a major disaster declaration request for the State of North Dakota and ordered federal support into the region to help state and local officials respond to the flooding. This was followed by an emergency declaration for the State of Minnesota. And we are also keeping close watch on the situation in South Dakota as it develops.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency continue to coordinate the federal response. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is helping to oversee federal efforts and she remains in close contact with state officials. Acting FEMA administrator Nancy Ward has been in the region since yesterday to meet with folks on the ground and survey the area herself.

In addition, The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is assisting in the emergency construction of levees. The Coast Guard is aiding in search and rescue efforts while the Department of Defense is helping to move people and supplies. Members of the National Guard have been activated and are on the scene as well.

This response is in sharp relief with President Bush's inept or indifferent handling of Katrina. It definitively shows that our current President can, in fact, walk and chew gum at the same time, despite the suggestion of many Republicans that he shouldn't be talking or thinking about anything except the economy.

His response should also put to rest the fear of some white Americans, particularly in Appalachia and the deep south, who didn't vote for Obama because they feared he would "favor Blacks over Whites" (see chart for African-American concentration in Minnesota and the Dakotas). This, again, provides sharp contrast with President Bush, who Kanye West famously said "didn't care about black people" after Katrina. At the time, many in the media mocked this statement, but under President Bush, who has now moved from the ranch that Karl Rove had him buy so he could seem more folksy to an all-white gated community in Texas, the wealth gap between whites and African Americans widened to the point where African-American families, on average, now own just one TENTH of the wealth of a typical white family. So much for the "post-racial society" we keep hearing about.

The President also used his address this week to speak about the power of inidividual service, calling the relief effort

...a reminder of what we can achieve when Americans come together to serve their communities. All across the nation, there are men, women and young people who have answered that call, and millions of other who would like to. Whether it’s helping to reduce the energy we use, cleaning up a neighborhood park, tutoring in a local school, or volunteering in countless other ways, individual citizens can make a big difference. 

That is why I’m so happy that legislation passed the Senate this week and the House last week to provide more opportunities for Americans to serve their communities and the country.

The bipartisan Senate bill was sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Ted Kennedy, a leader who embodies the spirit of public service, and I am looking forward to signing this important measure into law.

This echoes many of the themes that NDN fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais have discussed recently on this blog, showing yet again that we are entering a new, civic era of American politics.

Watch the video of President Obama's address below: