Crackberry’s a Hell of a Drug
By Dylan Matthews - Jan 8th, 2009 at 11:11 amThe Secret Service is going to have to pry Obama’s Blackberry from his cold, dead hands:
“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday. “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.”
Of all the fights facing Mr. Obama as he prepares for the White House, one of the most maddening for him is the prospect of losing the BlackBerry that has been attached to his belt for years. It is, he has vigorously argued, an essential link to keeping him apprised of events outside his ever-tightening cocoon.
The group that should really be worried about this isn’t the Secret Service; it’s Obama’s advisers, those in the West Wing especially. Traditionally, one of the most important powers the adviser corps has on the president is its control over his information supply. After all, most presidents didn’t have the time to read newspapers or intelligence reports on their own; they needed to rely on aides to brief them. This led to fierce competition among advisers, with those of different ideological stripes fighting to supply information favorable to their preferred policy to the president, often without concern for providing him with a complete picture.
On the surface, keeping his Blackberry will give Obama an end-run around this issue. But it could also raise problems of its own. Given the limitations of peoples’ ability to process information, simply getting more of it is not certain to improve his decision-making. Indeed, it could lead to indecision or, worse, knee-jerk decisions intended to reduce dissonance between sources. Also, depending on the emails and RSS feeds he’d be keeping up on, his Blackberry could be skewed just as much as his advisers, only in less consistently ideological ways. Recall how Bush’s insistence on communicating directly with field commanders led to an overly tactical understanding of the war and resulted in bad policy, despite giving him a direct view of the conflict.
If nothing else, the social scientist in me wants Obama to keep the Blackberry to see which effect it has. Disposing of it may be a safer bet, but Obama’s decision-making process then sure wouldn’t be as interesting to write papers on.
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