Don't know if you've noticed, but Obama's Change.gov website launched with a carbon copy of his campaign issues and is now absent. Some people predictably have been whining about it. A little editorial on why it doesn't really matter.
A surprising number of people seem to be going a bit ZOMG teh c0v3rup!!1! over reports that several "agenda" pages on Barack Obama's freshly-launched transition site, Change.gov, were recently taken down. Or, if you have a taste for melodrama, "scrubbed" from the site, like unsightly soap scum. The Washington Times is typically breathless, with a stock line-up of quotation-slingers blasting the change as "the opposite of transparency" and speculating about which flips Obama's about to flop. Wade out into the blogs and you'll find ominous intimations that the pages contained "radical, liberal ideas that the Obama campaign must have decided it didn’t want Americans to scrutinize just yet."
Except as far as I can tell—and as a few of the stories about this seem to confirm—the "agenda" pages that were pulled down are just verbatim copies of all the "issues" backgrounders that have been up on the Obama campaign site for months now. If this is an attempt to hide a radical agenda, it's a stunningly inept one, because they're all still up there. I have no idea why the pages were pulled from the newer site, though I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of campaign position papers copied over hastily for the launch needed to be retooled to read more like a coherent and ordered presidential agenda.
Whatever the reason, if there's any substantive change in Obama's positions—whether overt or implicit—we're not going to need sophisticated data forensics, or even the Wayback Machine, to discover it. If any significant component of Obama's health plan were so much as tweaked, you'd have 500 wonks yodeling it from the rooftops inside an hour. If he decided to pull the 147th Forward Support Company out of Iraq a week ahead of the 327th Infantry Regiment, Talking Points Memo would do an eight-part series. The chances of the president-elect surreptitiously pivoting on any issue of greater moment than his new puppy's eye color are, to a first approximation, nil.
Which makes the story here... what exactly? "New Web site still under construction"?
Declan McCullagh stays relatively sober, but nevertheless has an uncharacteristic "What hath Vint Cerf wrought?" moment:
The ephemeral nature of Web publishing does raise some serious issues: if a president-elect circulates a physical press release promising to do something, and then changes his mind, there's a paper trail. That doesn't exist when files are added to a Web site and then quietly removed over a weekend.
And I don't know what to do here except make one of those Scooby-Doo "Rruuuh?" faces, because it seems clear that just the opposite is true: Campaign claims used to be relatively easy to fudge over time, or even from place to place, because the "paper trail" was only any use to the people who had all the paper at their fingertips and the time to sort through it. On the Web, every displaced comma is preserved in a hundred caches, and probably already being compared to YouTube clips of a surrogate's speech in Tuscaloosa from July. Not a sparrow falls to earth without the blogosphere's notice.
Probably no executive in history has had less leeway to finesse a repositioning than Barack Obama. So can we stop freaking out over the Change.gov changelog?
