Obama Makes a Facebook Event (and Avoids the Real Journalists)

Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg are friends on Facebook — and in real life too. The president has met the founder of the social networking site several times in this arena which, as well as being a communicative strategy, is an existential trend: Obama loves innovative people, those who build their own businesses through revolutionary ideas and put new energies in motion. In the president’s ideal world, various communicators Zuckerberg, Schmidt (Google) and Jobs (Apple) are representatives of the president in civil society, a kind of informal board that fits in perfectly with the presidential vision.

Yesterday Obama and Zuckerberg solidified their meeting with the president’s visit to Facebook’s general headquarters in Palo Alto, and a meeting — via Facebook, obviously — with thousands of members of the public (23,000 responded) to share a new campaign act: “shared responsibility and shared prosperity,” with which Obama is spreading the message of economic policies announced at George Washington University last week around America. These policies, according to many observers, convinced Standard & Poor’s to revisit in a negative light their judgement of America’s debt caused by insufficient cuts in spending. The story of Facebook rallies, text voting, Twitter interviews and Skype calling — in short, a president allied with technology — is an old one compared with Obama’s ascension to the White House. What is new is the use of an ideal partnership as a common enterprise strategy between the president and the great innovators of Silicon Valley. Yesterday’s event is part of an exchange between Obama and Zuckerberg in which both of them can take home the prize: Obama gives a young and cool edge to his second electoral campaign, which had had a bad rap after previous battles and speeches which were very important but a little boring for the younger voters; Zuckerberg doesn’t need any more Facebook friends, neither does he need more money (over $1 billion in profit a year should suffice), but he does need to gain some credit in the political world. In California the founder is a god-like figure, but in Washington the lobbyists who work for him haven’t yet found the right connections. Last year the K Street office only invested $351,000 in Washington, compared with the millions thrown into Google and Apple.

One of the Obama operations trying to build the White House/Palo Alto bridge has exceeded every expectation. Robert Gibbs, former spokesman for the White House and close friend of Obama, was destined to occupy a very important pigeonhole in the Facebook organism, probably director of communication. But according to the the Wall Street Journal, negotiations have moved into the topic of indiscretions brought to light a few weeks ago by an unknown person. Getting in with a guy in the know within Facebook right at the beginning of an electoral campaign would have been a great thing for Obama, which must be going through his mind right now as he tries to forge a non-virtual friendship with Zuckerberg and all those who surround him. Outside of social networking, Obama seems to have lost the tact which had made him a demigod of communication. In a seven-minute interview with Brad Watson from the Texan station WFAA, the president is warmed up with quick-fire questions (but not too many) from the journalist, who once had the boldness to correct him (“We lost by a few percentage points in Texas,” said Obama. “Well, you lost by about 10,” Watson responded, himself undervaluing the reality, which was 12 points). At the end of the interview, the very irritated president snapped, “Let me finish my answers next time, OK?” and then turned back to Facebook.