It’s important for the president of the United States to get as much information from as many sources as possible, but Obama may be overdoing it. His Twitter account — the third most popular, after Lady Gaga’s and Justin Bieber’s — has signed up for updates from 697,726 people, more than anyone else on the entire site. In addition to security briefings from the Director of National Intelligence and jobs reports from the Office of Management and Budget, the President gets news from Miss.Xplicit, Orgasmblushh, bikini model Krystal Starr, N0Bama and Athena the Dog, a jujitsu-loving canine that tweets regularly despite having died last month. He also gets updates from the rapper Trey Songz like “Trinidad what up!!! Looking forward to the sand & the beeeaaachheeezzzz!!!!” I totally get that the leader of the free world has to keep up on the death-metal music scene in Indonesia, so when the band Lifeless writes, “After lot of discussion, finally our guitarist is resign for 2nd time,” he’s the first to know. But it seems equally crucial that he know that I find ending a letter with Sincerely to be very insincere. And yet the President is not following me on Twitter. To figure out how to rectify this I called the rapper N.O.R.E. and asked what his trick was. A few years ago, N.O.R.E. was jealous after Soulja Boy bragged that Obama followed him on Twitter: “I said, I’d love to have the President follow me on Twitter. And I checked, and he was following me!” N.O.R.E. has two theories as to how this happened. One: “In 1998, Obama was a professor. I’m sure some of his kids were playing ‘Superthug.’ Who’s to say he wasn’t listening to that?” Two: “Every so often I’d say, ‘Hey, @BarackObama, way too much Hennessy for me. Hangover time. See you next week, my brother.'” N.O.R.E. suggested I try something like that to get the President’s attention. I considered tweeting, “Hey, @BarackObama, supercool eating organic buffalo burgers and watching Parks and Recreation on the couch with you and my wife,” but it sounded creepy. Obama is also following Ben Wu, my college roommate and godfather to my son. Until I called, Ben didn’t even know the President was following him. But he wasn’t at all excited, figuring it was due to an auto-follow option. “There’s no reason he would follow me,” Ben said. “Look at my tweet history.” If our President doesn’t care about Ben’s love for Costco’s customer service and his ironic observation that the PGA Tour rules official is named Slugger White, then that’s an America I don’t want to live in. Because Obama follows him, Ben can send the President direct messages on Twitter. We decided to send him a message asking if he would show his friend Ben, and only his friend Ben, the photos of dead Osama bin Laden. But Ben didn’t want to get on any kind of weird White House terrorist lists. So instead Ben sent the President a message asking him to follow me. When I didn’t hear anything from the White House, I called the Administration directly to beg Obama to follow me.
