State of the Union: Cloudy with a chance of Sunshine

President Obama had his first State of the Union address last night, and gave a brief shout out to transparency. And by “shout out,” I mean apology. Reason Blog’s Jacob Sullum put it better than I could have, saying:

Yesterday I noted that President Obama, in an interview with ABC news anchor Diane Sawyer, had acknowledged his failure to deliver on his oft-repeated promise to televise health care negotiations on C-SPAN. “It’s my responsibility,” he said, “and I’ll be speaking to this at the State of the Union, to own up to the fact that the process didn’t run the way I ideally would like it to and that we have to move forward in a way that recaptures that sense of opening things up more.” So how did he address the transparency issue in last night’s speech? There was this, referring to the health care debate:

This is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse trading, the process left most Americans wondering, “What’s in it for me?”

Obama did not acknowledge that the public’s suspicion may have been magnified by his failure to do what he promised to do: make the process fully transparent, so that everyone knew what was going on before Congress voted on the final legislation. Instead, as usual, there was a sense that our elected representatives were deciding our fates behind closed doors, the better to facilitate all that “lobbying and horse trading.” The C-SPAN coverage that did not happen (that was in fact blocked by the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, with nary a protest from the president) was symbolic of this failure. Last night Obama was even less forthright in accepting responsibility for the lack of transparency than he was in the interview with Sawyer, saying only that he should have explained things more clearly, as if the problem could have been solved with a really good Powerpoint presentation.

I would also content that transparency is not needed just for controversial measures being brought forward. If Obama was truly dedicated to transparency, he would do more than offer Americans a weak apology. I want to see more affirmative disclosure of information, not just in the legislature, but for government agencies, the Judicial Branch and the Executive Branch as well. As proud as I am to see representatives twittering, we need real data posted in real time for 2010.