This chart is from a propaganda sheet called the Daily Caller. It may be distorted in some way because visitor logs are not always accurate about the entire comings and goings at the White House (many senior figures aren’t counted, for example). I’d be grateful for reader scrutiny of this data – simply because I do not trust the source, and there may be context I’m missing. But if the Caller is right that in the Bush years, “Shulman’s predecessor Mark Everson only visited the White House once during four years of service in the George W. Bush administration,” we need an explanation – and fast.
Update from a reader:
I just read your post about Doug Shulman’s excessive number of visits, and the context seems clear to me. I may be viewing this through an experience filter, as it’s my full-time job to work with a major health insurance company to implement Obamacare, but the IRS is the agency primarily responsible for figuring out who is eligible for the plans and subsidies offered via the exchanges. They are undergoing, with HHS, a massive implementation effort right now to ensure the new plans can be purchased in October. While this may not explain all of the visits, it could certainly explain a large part of them. There’s a lot of investment across the board in making sure this goes right, and there certainly wasn’t anything like it during the Bush administration.
Update: More readers dismantle the Caller’s bullshit here.
The Dish 