Looks like our Commander-in-chief has a little bit of a nerdy side.
"We came in when the economy was tanking and our first priority wasn't redecorating," President Barak Obama recently told Vanity Fair. But since settling in, Obama's made at least one interesting adjustment to his official White House workspace.
Obama stated in the interview that previous administrations "had a bunch of plates" lining the Oval Office shelves. "I'm not a dish guy," he told Vanity Fair. Instead, he swapped the china out for famous patents and models, including Samuel Morse's 1849 patent for the first telegraph. "This is the start of the Internet right here," he told the magazine.
After learning of Obama's decorations in the Oval Office, The Atlantic dubbed him our "geek in chief" -- and maybe that catchy title holds true.
Obama was one of the first presidential candidates to truly embrace social media, resulting in an overwhelming response from potential voters during the 2008 election. Since then, contenders from both sides of the political spectrum have embraced Facebook Fan Pages and the Twittersphere to reach out to prospective voters. But Obama still has clout in the digital world: During the 2012 Democratic National Convention, the President's speech prompted 52,756 tweets per minute, a new Twitter record for a politician.
Obama also recently hosted an "Ask Me Anything" session on social news site Reddit, spurring record traffic to the site and prompting questions about everything from the drug war to the economy.
Still, even a "geek in chief" has occasional technology snafoos. Just this past week, Obama couldn't quite seem to operate an iPhone while campaigning in Florida. "See, I still have a BlackBerry," the president quipped to journalists after struggling with the iPhone for a moment.
Is Obama our geekiest president ever, or does he still have a lot to learn about technology?
Our 2024 Coverage Needs You
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.