-By Warner Todd Huston
The hand-in-hand nature of this White House and some of the nation’s biggest corporations is seen in yet another incident as Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign data team is now moving from team Obama to team Google.
This week, Bloomberg reported that Obama’s data mining team, used to such great effect during his 2012 re-election for president, has been hired nearly wholesale to go work for Google.
This may not come as such a great surprise, however, as Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, helped organize and run Obama’s re-election e-team.
Schmidt “helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization,” Bloomberg reports.
Since he came onto the national political scene, Barack Obama has campaigned like a veritable David vs Goliath with evil corporations standing in for Goliath while Obama presents himself as David loading his sling shot to do battle. But the reality is not quite that cut and dried and Google has been a big recipient of Obama’s largesse.
The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney points out that the administration is filled with Googleites and that President Obama and Google have a long standing love affair.
Remember Obama’s No. 2 tech staffer at the White House was Google’s former top lobbyist–who improperly worked with active Google lobbyists on pushing policy that Google supported.
Obama appointed non-registered Google lobbyist and max-Obama donor Vint Cerf to a science advisory board.
Then there was the time when Google chief Schmidt is reported to have told a Google staffer to make sure that the search engine did not connect his entries to his own political donations so that it was a bit harder to find out to whom he donated campaign cash.
The Google chairman has recently been on a tour of some of the most oppressive nations in the far east with visits to North Korea and Myanmar. Schmidt was asked in India this week why he went to the oppressive nations, especially North Korea.
Schmidt claimed that he went to the oppressive, hermit nation as an evangelist for a free and open Internet. But just as he left the nation cyber attacks spread throughout the world with the North Koreans the suspected hackers behind the attacks.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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