🚀 go-pugleaf

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Date: Wed, 24 Feb 93 15:41:55 PST
From: mrosema@eis.calstate.edu (Mel Roseman)

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT TO EMPLOYEES OF THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND
BUDGET 3 feb

             When I took office, the White House had a telephone
system that had been there since President Carter -- (laughter) --
and a switchboard that has been there since the 1960s.  They talk
about jamming the White House switchboards -- you can do it tomorrow
if you want to; it's not hard.  (Laughter.)

             I could not have a conference call in my office on my
telephone, except an unwanted one -- anybody in the central office
could punch a lighted button and listen to what I had to say.
(Laughter and applause.)

             The American people, I think, would be pretty surprised
and disappointed that after a dozen years of people who promised to
run the government like a business -- they meant a business in the
1950s, not for the 21st century.  (Laughter.)

.....

>From: reuters@msen.com (Msen Reuters Automated News)
Newsgroups: msen.reuters.washington
Subject: [clinton-communication] clinton making white house computer friendly
Fcc: +answers
Date: 3 Feb 1993 13:0:39 -0500

AM-CLINTON-COMMUNICATIONS (SCHEDULED)
CLINTON MAKING WHITE HOUSE COMPUTER FRIENDLY

    By Steve Holland
    WASHINGTON, Reuter - Bill Clinton's aides knew the White
House phone system left something to be desired when they
discovered the operators transferring calls by plugging cords
into holes.
    Then the president himself tried to arrange his own
conference call and found he could not do it without getting an
operator or a secretary involved.
    ``I was amazed,'' Clinton said later, showing frustration
probably similar to that of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who
installed the first phone at the White House in 1877 but had
nobody to call because few people had phones then.
    For Clinton, it was not long before a deluge of calls from
Americans interested in expressing their opinions on topics
ranging from Zoe Baird to gays in the military overwhelmed the
White House, which could handle only 5,000 calls a day.
    Phones either went unanswered or people found a constant
busy signal. It was a terrible embarrassment for Clinton, whose
1992 campaign prided itself for its communications and whose
headquarters could accept 60,000 calls a day.
    His immediate reaction was to blame the Republicans.
    ``The other crowd had the White House for 12 years, and they
have presented themselves as businesslike and modern, you know,
and tried to make the Democrats look like yesterday's crowd.
Well, when I got to the White House, guess what I found? Same
phone system Jimmy Carter had,'' he said recently referring to
the last Democrat to win the White House.
    For 200 years the White House has been subjected to the
whims of the presidents and every occupant has left a mark on
the place, whether it be Harry Truman's complete rebuilding job
or Jackie Kennedy's redecorating.
    Now, Clinton and his team are trying to bring White House
phones and the executive mansion's computer system up to date
and ready for the 21st century.
    ``It's a yesterday place, and we need to make it a tomorrow
place,'' Clinton said.
    Some of this work is falling to Jeff Eller, Clinton's
director of media affairs, a moustachioed fellow who lives and
breathes computer software, electronic mail, satellite uplinks
and the like.
    ``Tyson's Chicken had a better phone system than we had in
the White House before we got here,'' says Eller, referring to a
large Arkansas business that Clinton's Little Rock headquarters
surpassed as the state's largest in phone capacity when his
campaign picked up steam last year.
    Eller says there is a generational, philosophical and
emotional gap between the new White House team and that of
George Bush, who only learned how to use a computer in the last
couple of years and often complained he could not program his
television video cassette recorder.
    ``What I'm talking about is that we are for the most part
younger, computer literate, comfortable with computers and
understand their value in moving information,'' Eller said.
    The Clinton team has already installed a comments line for
everyday Americans to phone in their concerns. It's
202-456-1111.
    And the team is working to allow the system to accept more
calls, helping out the half-dozen or so weary operators who
still plug patch cords into holes to transfer calls -- a system
that apparently dates back at least to the Kennedy
administration in the early 1960s.
    Clinton's assistants are also seeing how they can expand the
capacity of an obsolete mainframe computer and adapt it for
easier access to ``E-mail,'' an electronic mail system in which
people can quickly send messages to each other via computer
terminals.
    Troubled by the sight of an old wire service teletype
printer when he got to the White House, Eller is improving the
ability to call up news on more computer terminals rather than
printing out stories and copying them for distribution.
    ``Emotionally, our heads are always in touch with the news
cycle. That's how we think,'' Eller said. ``We believe that the
more information you share, the better you're going to be.''
 REUTER


  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 4562 (fax: 998 4563)
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--
______________________________________________________________________________
Mel Roseman
Internet email:  mrosema@eis.calstate.edu

--
______________________________________________________________________________
Mel Roseman
Internet email:  mrosema@eis.calstate.edu