George W. Bush is not the first president to turn the official White House website, www.whitehouse.gov, into a public-relations vehicle; toward the end of Bill Clinton's second term, the site was used to
trumpet the record of his administration. But the Bush Administration has turned a site financed by tax dollars into something increasingly hard to distinguish from www.rnc.org, a site far more shamelessly self-promoting than, say, that of Bush's good friend Vladimir Putin.
Compare the English version of the official President of Russia website with the White House site. Putin's is certainly intended to put him and his policies in a good light. But its tone is matter-of-fact and it avoids hagiography. By contrast, one of the front-page stories on Whitehouse.gov is Bagdad-Bobish in its exaggeration: President's Record of Achievement has as its lead sentence
President George W. Bush's first term has been among the most consequential and successful in modern times.
(For values of "modern times" equivalent to "among American presidents in the 21st Century"?)
The document lacks only the tag "Vote for Bush" to qualify as a pure campaign document. It's as offensive as it would be to drape a huge "Bush/Cheney 2004" banner across the physical White House. I don't know whether it's possible for material on Whitehouse.gov to cross a line that would attract the attention of the Federal Election Commission, but it doesn't really matter: the Bush administration, in this as in some many other areas of its responsibility, has cynically distorted an arm of the government into a stalking-horse for its election campaign.