http://conservativeactionalerts.com/blog_post/show/1584With President Obama blaming his party's midterm losses, at least in part, on his failure to change the way Washington works, transparency advocates say now is the time for him to follow through on a slew of unfulfilled pledges he made during the 2008 campaign.
Transparency was a cornerstone of Mr. Obama's campaign. He impressed observers during his first year in office by issuing an open-government directive to executive agencies and publicizing logs of visitors to the White House, albeit as part of a legal settlement with a watchdog group. The administration also has started posting Mr. Obama's public schedule online and stepped up compliance with his promise to post bills online and wait five days before signing them.
At the same time, analysts say Mr. Obama has failed to deliver on the full letter, if not the spirit, of many of these initiatives, such as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s instructions that the executive branch approach freedom-of-information requests with a presumption toward disclosure. Critics praise the aim of the open-government directive, but argue that the administration must do a better job to ensure that the data made available to the public by participating agencies is truly meaningful.
"The good intentions have been there all along, but change is hard, and so the talk of change has started to ring fairly empty here at the midpoint," said Jim Harper, director of information-policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Mr. Harper and other observers preface their criticisms by noting that many of the challenges are institutional and not inherent to Mr. Obama, and give him credit for taking the first steps by issuing directives and executive orders. It's the follow-through where his administration is coming up short, they say.
The president laid out the problem in his postelection soul-searching news conference.
"When I won election in 2008, one of the reasons I think that people were excited about the campaign was the prospect that we would change how business is done in Washington," Mr. Obama told reporters Nov. 3, the day after elections in which his party lost more than 60 seats and control of the House. "We were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn't change how things got done. And I think that frustrated people."
Mr. Obama noted that he had signed "a bunch of bills that had earmarks in them, which was contrary to what I had talked about." During his presidential campaign, he pushed for limiting the practice by which lawmakers circumvent the normal appropriations process and insert pet projects into legislation.
In January, during his first State of the Union address to Congress, the president called for the creation of an online database that would list the billions of dollars in earmark requests submitted each year by lawmakers - far more information than is currently kept in the Earmarks.gov database, which tracks only final, approved spending. He said he plans to work with congressional Republicans, who have adopted temporary earmark bans, in the future.
Mr. Obama likewise conceded that the legislative process surrounding the health care overhaul was an "ugly mess" - a reference to the special deals, derided by critics as the "Louisiana Purchase" and the "Cornhusker Kickback," that Democratic leaders struck to secure the votes of key senators. But pressed on whether he regrets allowing those sweeteners to stand, the president argued that the ends justified the means, saying the "outcome was a good one."
Topic: Obama's transparency record not so clear (Read 617 times)