WASHINGTON — Before he ran for president Barack Obama quit smoking. Now that he’s won the job, he may have to break another addiction: Checking his BlackBerry for e-mail.
The president’s e-mail can be subpoenaed by Congress and courts and may be subject to public records laws, so if a president doesn’t want his e-mail public, he shouldn’t e-mail, experts said. And there may be security issues about carrying around trackable cell phones.
President-elect Obama transition officials haven’t made a decision on what the new president will or will not carry, but those who have been there say it’s unlikely he’ll carry his BlackBerry and he may be in for some withdrawal pains.
“Definitely he’s going to feel an electronic detoxing,” said Reed Dickens, former assistant press secretary to President Bush. Dickens jokes that he personally is so addicted to his BlackBerry that he checks his device before opening his right eye.
Obama has often been seen avidly checking his e-mail on his handheld equipment. This past summer, news cameras recorded him checking his BlackBerry while watching his daughter’s soccer game, only to have Michelle Obama slap at his hands, prompting him to return the device to its holster.
“While he has pledged an open and transparent government, I doubt the president-elect is interested in subjecting his own personal communications to that standard,” said former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan, who added that Obama’s legal advisers will probably recommend against an e-mailing president. “He will have to think very hard about whether he wants to make his own words that subject to open records by having his own e-mail and his own BlackBerry.”
There is presidential precedent for an e-mail blackout. Presidents Bush and Clinton didn’t e-mail while in office.
“It’s all discoverable; it creates a trail that might end up in congressional investigators’ hands,” said Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry. If you want to delete White House e-mail, you get a stern warning about archiving presidential records, he said.
A few days before Bush took office in 2001, he sent an e-mail to a few dozen close friends saying he would no longer use e-mail: “Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me.”
The Bush White House has been battling courts about lapses in e-mail archives at the White House.
“I think Obama is the first president who is addicted to the BlackBerry like the rest of us, and there’s a lot of presidential records and archive rules on what gets stored and what doesn’t,” said former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart.
But even if Obama isn’t packing a BlackBerry or cell phone, he’ll have plenty of aides within arm’s reach who do, experts said. Often a president uses the equipment of personal assistants.
And there is the chance that Obama may buck the past and keep his BlackBerry tethered to his belt.
“He’s the president,” McCurry said. “If he wants to carry the BlackBerry, he’s entitled.”
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