Who is Ron Andrew?
The White House continues to release their visitor files, and we continue to provide analysis on them that goes beyond simple counting. See here, here, here, and here for our previous analyses which contain more detailed descriptions of the myriad data acrobatics we have to perform to turn the decidedly dumb data we receive from the White House into true knowledge.
Analysis today focuses exclusively on the 60,210 non-classified non-tour visits to the White House between September 16, 2009 and November 30, 2009.
The most frequent visitor to the White House was again a tie between Anna E. Bartosiewicz, a staff member at Touchstone SRA, and Elizabeth Vale, Executive Director of the White House Business Council, each coming to the White House 60 times over that 75 day period.
56 of Bartosiewicz's meetings were with Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer of the United States, while Vale met 11 times with Matthew Tranchin the staff assistant in the Office of Public Engagement, 7 times with Anne Brewer Executive Assistant in the Office of Public Engagement, and 6 times with Shawn Maher Deputy Director of the Office of Legislative Affairs (among many other appointments).
Other frequent visitors were Claudia McNamara (46 visits), Neera Tanden the incoming COO of the Center for American Progress (33), and Alexandre Mas, a labor economist (30).
The most frequent visitee is once again the mysterious "Andrew" - most likely Ron Andrew, who is frustratingly not listed in the White House staffer salary database. Andrew held an astonishing 305 meetings during this time, nearly two times the number meetings the second place staffer, Benjamin Milakofsky, Special Assistant to the Cabinet Secretary, had at 178.
Can anyone out there tell me who Ronald Andrew is and why he's the most visited person in the White House?
The most frequent combination of visitor and visitee was the previously mentioned Bartosiewicz/Kundra meetings (56). Following that, Claudia McNamara (?) met 32 times with Clare Gallagher, formerly an organizer with OFA whose current position at the White House I could not ascertain, and David Sharfstein a professor of finance at Harvard Business School met with Larry Summers 18 times.
Finally, it's also worth noting that nearly 6 out of every 10 visits is lacking a description of for the meeting.
This marks the fifth time the White House has released visitor logs while boasting of its unprecedented "transparency." Yes, this is certainly a level of disclosure that is an order of magnitude greater than previous presidential administrations. However, one can't help but notice that three of these five releases occurred on late Friday afternoons, while the remaining two releases were the day before Thanksgiving and decidedly desolate date of December 30th, while the average time of their release was 3:15pm. These Friday afternoon news dumps are a fairly "transparent" attempt to keep these visitor records out of the mainstream media. So, despite White House boasts of releasing "150,000 rays of sunlight," I think we can all agree that those rays shine less brightly on a late Friday afternoon than they might at other times.
- Alex Lundry
Comments on this entry
We campaign in poetry and we govern in prose. I think in politics we must take it as a given that actual behavior will be some derivative of campaign promises. But still, this data is great to have and analyze.
I have no idea who Ron Andrew is (tried doing some investigating on my own and turned up nada), but am dying to know.