Our Humanities Matter! conference was a great success! I’ll be writing a program report soon, I’m sure, and I also hope to include reports from those of you who were there (any volunteers?). In the meantime, let’s turn our attention to the White House, just for fun!
The rhetoric of how the president presents himself is not limited to what he says and how he says it. For a glimpse into the president’s daily life, check out the Official White House Photostream. Lots of speechmaking, and purposeful striding, and folks in suits (my sole complaint about Washington, DC, by the way, is that it has the least interesting fashion of any major city I’ve ever visited). But there are a few gems: President Obama’s jump shot; the look on a student’s face as he applauds her for singing a song during his visit to a New Orleans school; his niece holding up a dandelion for him to blow the seeds away.
There are also loads of videos on the White House site. Again, it takes some sifting, but my favorite one so far is “Letters to the President,” which explains how the ten letters from the public that President Obama reads every day are chosen from the 65,000 letters and 100,000 emails he receives each week.
If you’re looking for something not generated by the White House itself, the St. Petersburg Times’s Politifact is keeping track of which campaign promises President Obama has kept and broken with The Obameter! The ratings are as follows: Promise Kept, Compromise, Promise Broken, In the Works, Stalled, and Not Yet Rated. A recent kept promise: Push for the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act, which extends hate crime legislation to include sexual orientation and other factors. A broken promise: Eliminate income tax for seniors making less than $50,000 per year. Worth checking on periodically, don’t you think?
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