President Barack Obama doesn’t have any more offices to run for, so now he turns to one of the most first-world problems in politics: what to do with that list of millions of e-mail addresses and phone numbers for donors, volunteers, and supporters. It’s a good problem for a politician to have, but as The Wall Street Journal points out, it’s still a problem. Like a mansion or a really big yacht, the database takes a lot of time and money to maintain, but unlike those things, nobody’s quite sure what purpose it can serve now. Obama plans to appeal to his 2012 supporters to help get his agenda through Congress, but he’s only had limited success with that in the past, the Journal notes. The Democrats could maybe use the database for other races, but since it was built around the appeal of Obama, to be used with his data team, it’s not necessarily going to translate. And the database becomes more obsolete every day it’s not maintained. If you’ve got ideas for what to do with it, the Obama team is all ears.
