White House Visitor Logs
Last Friday, the White House blog heralded “Transparency Like You’ve Never Seen Before” (http://bit.ly/3h4HFY) in which the first of an ongoing series of datasets containing the records of visitors to the White House were made available. This dataset represents an amazing opportunity for TargetPoint, a firm that specializes in turning data into knowledge, to ply its trade and see what insight we can snatch from this data-dump.
LIMITATIONS
First, despite the many opportunities this datasets represent, there is one serious shortcoming: the White House will not begin distributing full datasets of visitor logs until the end of the year, and those new datasets will only reach back to September 15th. The dataset released last week covers day one of the Obama presidency through July, BUT, it only contains records that people have specifically requested.
This means we begin our analysis with a biased sample. The dataset is populated only with names people could think to ask for, so we are heavy with heavy-hitter names such as Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Immelt, and Al Gore. We also face a number of what the White House calls “false positives” – instances in which someone requested records for a famous name (i.e. Jeremiah Wright), and while that specific famous person had never been to the White House, another poor soul that shares their name had.
Thus our sample is filled only with the biggest, shiniest objects, and not necessarily the most interesting ones.
So, what can we learn then from the (flawed) dataset we have?
MOST FREQUENT VISITOR
The most frequent visitor is NOT William Smith, as many have reported. If you look also at middle initials you see that the William Smith that appears to have visited 27 times actually consists of middle initials: A, B, C, H, J, K, L, N, S, W, Y, and no middle initial. (For the record, Will Smith the actor’s middle initial is C).
Instead, the most frequent visitor in this database is Andy Stern, president of the SEIU, the nation’s largest labor union. In the first six months of the Obama administration Stern visited the White House at least 20 times (as Andrew L. Stern), and most likely another two times under the names Andy Stern and Andrew Stern, averaging about one visit per week.
Stern’s visits break down as follows:
7 POTUS
6 Kristin Sheehy (Exec Assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations)
2 Ron Klain (Biden’s COS)
1 VPOTUS
1 Rahm Emanuel (Obama’s COS)
1 Tina Tchen (special assistant to Valerie Jarrett)
1 Peter Orszag (director of OMB)
1 Max Doebler (Ceremonies Coordinator)
1 Jennifer Cannistra (helping to oversee health care reform)
1 Visitors Office
Descriptions are provided for 10 of the 22 visits, ranging from “event around SCOTUS” to “St. Patrick’s Reception Guests,” leaving more than half without description. Unlabeled meetings include: 1 with POTUS (plus a generic label of “meeting” for another), every visit with Kristin Sheehy, the meeting with Orszag, and all meetings with Klain and Emmanuel.
After Stern, the only other visitors to break into the double digits were: John Podesta (17) chair of the transition team, Kim Gandy (15) president of the National Organization for Women from 2001-2009, and Tom Daschle (11) Obama’s initial pick to head HHS.
MOST FREQUENTLY VISITED
The most frequently visited person is President Barack Obama, appearing as the visitee in 20% of the records (98 out of 481). He is followed by the Visitor’s Office, through which tours must enter. After these two obvious leaders, the most frequently visited person in this sample is Tina Tchen, the special assistant to Valerie Jarrett.
Her most frequent visitor was Kim Gandy, former head of NOW, meeting 4 times. Other multi-appointment visitors to Tchen were Nancy Keenan, head of NARAL, Ralph Smith the Director of Leapfrog Enterprises, and former Congressman Steve Gunderson (R, WI-3), one of the first openly gay members of Congress.
MOST FREQUENT COMBINATIONS
We can also look at the most frequently occurring visitor/visitee combinations in order to establish any recurring patterns. They are as follows:
7 Andy Stern and POTUS
6 Andy Stern and Kristin Sheehy
4 Alan Greenspan and Peter Orszag
4 Camden Fine (President of Independent Community Bankers Assocation) and POTUS
4 Cass Sunstein (head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) and Lisa Jones
4 Edward Yingling (CEO of the American Bankers Association) and POTUS
4 Jeffrey Jones and Bev Godwin (Director of Online Resources and Interdepartmental Development)
VISUALIZING THE MEETINGS
Finally, the dataset begs for visualization. Below, we have put the data into a tool called a Phrase Net which diagrams the relationship between words used in a text. This time the text consists of “X met w/ Y” and these relationships are mapped. Names in dark blue are visitors, and names in light blue are the person in the White House the meeting was with. The default setting below displays the top 30 (of 374) terms – however, this number, along with the zoom level, is fully interactive.
Ultimately while the dataset is not ideal it is still somewhat revealing. Most importantly, however, this provides us with meaningful analytical practice in anticipation of the release of a full dataset at the end of the year.
- Alex Lundry
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