How to Talk to the President

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How to Talk to the President

posted by bfeiler | 7:37am Monday December 10, 2007

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.
How do you get to the Oval Office? Wikipedia.

When Vífill Atlason, a 16-year-old high school student from Iceland, decided to call the White House, he could not imagine the kind of publicity it would bring.
Introducing himself as Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the actual president of Iceland, Atlason found President George W. Bush’s allegedly secret telephone number and phoned, requesting a private meeting with him.
“I just wanted to talk to him, have a chat, invite him to Iceland and see what he’d say,” Vífill told ABC News.
A White House official, who asked not to be identified, denied the young man had accessed a private number but instead dialled 202-456-1414, the main switchboard for the West Wing.
Vífill’s mother, Harpa Hreinsdottir, a teacher at the local high school, said her son did, in fact, get through to a private phone.
“This was not a switchboard number of any kind,” she told ABC News, “it was a secret number at the highest security level.”
Vífill claims he was passed on to several people, each of them quizzing him on President Grímsson’s date of birth, where he grew up, who his parents were and the date he entered office.
“It was like passing through checkpoints,” he said. “But I had Wikipedia and a few other sites open, so it was not so difficult really.”

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windyblue

posted December 14, 2007 at 9:04 am

They have to be careful as to who gets to talk to the president and who does not. That’s their job to protect him with there lives.
But the president is for the people. The american people who voted for him and he is really to answer to us. And we are to question our president. He is really just a MAN no different than anyother person.
He was created by God, and will die just like everyone else, he puts his clothes on just like anyother person. And gets sick just like anyother person. Yes he has a powerful job, that God gave him, and he WILL answer to God for what he has done and not done.
He does have a very hard job, and lots of people who fight against him in the government. But I think at times the president and the government in general forgot what our founding Fore Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Indpendence. And they need to read it.
We do live in a great country though, and I am glad to be born an American, and live here. We are very blessed in many ways compared to other countries.