Barack Obama pledged that if elected he would make it a goal to have much more transparency in his administration than those Presidents who preceded him. There was going to be Change. The transparency would bring about ‘accountability" in his words.
One of the policies he trumpeted would be making available to the public the White House visitor logs so we can know who visited with the President, the Vice-President and key officials of his team. Only later did we discover -- through outside investigators' efforts -- that these key officials were circumventing the new "policy" by meeting with lobbyists across the street from the White House at Caribou Coffee, as well as other spots so that their meetings would not show up on the logs.
Now, it turns out that the vaunted White House logs themselves are filled with "inaccuracies."
Alana Goodman at Commentary Contentions has more: Here is a reminder of yet another Obama campaign promise unfulfilled. His administration would be the most transparent in history, Obama vowed, but a new study by the Center for Public Integrity finds that the White House has been omitting names and details from the visitors' log.
"Five junior staff aides together received more than 4,440 visits," Politico reported. "By contrast, then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famed for his workaholic schedule, is listed as having fewer than 500 visits."
Meanwhile, Obama's personal assistant Reggie Love is recorded as receiving nearly 300 visits in the West Wing-including celebrities and friends of Obama's.
The study also found that less than 1 percent of roughly 500,000 visits during Obama's first eight months in office have been disclosed.
The main problem with the shoddy visitors' log is that it obscures key details of meetings with relevant political figures. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, Obama campaign bundlers, lobbyists, and drug company CEOs regularly visit the White House. But the logs often don't explain the purpose of the visits, or who the meetings were with.
The Obama administration claims that it has "taken unprecedented steps to increase transparency by releasing visitor records from the system each month." But releasing the records matters very little if the information is absent or clouded with inaccuracies.
Needless to say, debates over ObamaCare were not broadcast on C-SPAN as was also promised. Bills were not posted on-line for five days before they were voted upon to allow citizen comment and time for politicians to read. As National Review's Jim Geraghty has observed, all of Obama's promises have an expiration date (and back in March of last year, he posted a partial listing of these expired promises). Time for an update, Mr. Geraghty. One could go on and on regarding fibs about his budget, ObamaCare, and much else.
Louis Brandeis famously said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant". When combined with the administration's politically-motivated filtering of Freedom of Information requests (and the White House's refusal to release information that is the subject of the FOI requests), there does not seem to be much disinfecting -- or change -- going on during the Obama era.
Share