Last week, I complained loudly that the “Speeches” section of the Whitehouse.gov Web site had only four speeches on it, the most recent coming at the end of February.
And, voila, today the site is transformed. A new “speeches and remarks” page at that location has a 28-page list of official utterances from President Obama since he took office.
Does it matter a lot that people can now more easily find what President Obama has said? It kinda does. Americans will go a little more often right to the source rather than relying on media interpretations of what the president is saying. In the aggregate, we’ll have a better informed, slightly more skeptical, and more empowered populace.
Kudos to the folks at the White House for making the change. In retrospect, it appears that some arcane difference between “speeches” and “remarks” kept many important things the president says off the “Speeches” page. For my part, a 6,500-hundred word oration on national security delivered from behind a lectern is a speech, but the White House calls such a thing “remarks.”
