The Daily Background
| Obama confirms he *will* keep using his Blackberry as President
by Arlen Parsa
Despite legal and security hurdles, president-elect Barack Obama says he has a plan to retain his beloved Blackberry once he moves into the White House next week.
Interviewed by CNN Friday, Obama said the smartphone was among the tools that he would use to stay in touch with real Americans and avoid becoming trapped inside the presidential “bubble.”
“I think we’re going to be able to hang on to one of these. My working assumption, and this is not new, is that anything I write on an email could end up being on CNN,” he said.
“So I make sure to think before I press ’send’,” he said of his Blackberry, which was an ever-present fixture on his belt or in his hand on the campaign trail.
[…]
“It’s just one tool among a number of tools that I’m trying to use, to break out of the bubble, to make sure that people can still reach me,” he said.“If I’m doing something stupid, somebody in Chicago can send me an email and say, ‘What are you doing?’
“I want to be able to have voices, other than the people who are immediately working for me, be able to reach out and send me a message about what’s happening in America.”
That’s, um, quite a contrast to Bush, who doesn’t even use email and has been criticized widely for keeping himself insulated from popular opinion, aka what real people think.
