DANIEL, IN MASS.(The Talk of the Town)(Daniel Lippman, Ask the White House)

Daniel Lippman spent the summer at his parents' house, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, balancing light proofreading duties at the community newspaper with the more demoralizing demands of a grocery-store clerkship. Daniel is fifteen. He had just finished his freshman year at Hotchkiss. Like many boys his age, Daniel has an Internet habit his parents don't really understand. He interviews mid-level Bush Administration bureaucrats.

Daniel is the lone regular on Ask the White House, a forum on the White House's Web site. Once or twice a week, the site features a different Cabinet member, deputy assistant, or undersecretary--Daniel refers to them as "the policy setters." Each one answers a dozen questions submitted by ordinary citizens. The entire conversation then spools out beside his or her federal head shot. A September 11, 2003, exchange between a German man and Andrew Card went like this: German man: "I just wanted to say: God bless America! Today on 09.11 and forever!" Card: "Yes!!!!!!!!! Thank you!"

In 2004, Daniel visited Ask the White House for the first time, soliciting from the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget a rundown of recent cuts. That July, he asked Neil Armstrong if it was possible to send a man to Mars: "In your mind, could it work out, practically?" After his first successes, he made printouts and showed them to his parents, a psychiatrist and a garden writer. But these days, he said, when he sits down to dinner, "I'll usually just say, 'Oh, yeah. I asked the secretary of something-or-something something today.' "

After pressing Alberto Gonzales on the Patriot Act on April 12th, Daniel conversed with White House officials thirteen more times this summer. In addition to civil servants in Defense and the Small Business Administration, Daniel has ...