Mixed reviews for Obama's transparency vow
The spotlight is on President Obama's accomplishments at the end of his first 100 days in office.
(Credit: White House photo by Chuck Kennedy)This was originally posted on CBSNews.com.
A White House "virtual town hall" that Barack Obama hosted last month was intended to be an exercise in open-microphone democracy that would allow the president to interact with average Americans.
Aides billed it as permitting members of the public to "pose a question or vote for a particular question" using the Google Moderator utility. A new area of the WhiteHouse.gov Web site was titled Open For Questions, and nearly 1.8 million votes were cast.
That was the plan. After voting began, though, a committed group of mischievous activists (and their friends) deluged WhiteHouse.gov with their votes--and questions advocating the legalization of marijuana soon topped the site's "green jobs," "financial stability," "jobs," and "budget" categories. Obama eventually told the live audience that he doesn't think pot legalization is "a good strategy to grow our economy."
The White House's experience with reefer madness reflects the challenges that Obama faces when living up to his campaign pledge to create a "new level of transparency" through "cutting-edge technologies."
At 100 days into the Obama administration, Washington observers said that the president has made some significant steps toward using technology and the Internet to honor that campaign promise. In other ways, they said, Obama has not yet lived up to it.
"In general, we've been very optimistic," said Ari Schwartz, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Compared to his predecessors, Obama is an unusually wired chief executive. Bill Clinton sent only two e-mail messages as president and has yet to pick up the habit. George W. Bush ceased using e-mail in January 2001 and said toward the end of his presidency that he's looking forward to e-mailing "my buddies" after leaving the nation's capital.
But Obama, whose campaign made aggressive use of the Internet, is an inveterate e-mailer, saying "I'm still clinging to my BlackBerry" before taking office. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters after the inauguration that, thanks to a "compromise," his boss could keep a security-enhanced BlackBerry for e-mail.
Schwartz and others suggested that it's unfair to judge Obama's record on technology and openness after 100 days, especially when the president himself set a 120-day deadline for an internal review.
One of Obama's first acts as president was to sign a directive ordering his chief information officer to devise ways to make the administration more Internet-friendly within that time period. (The memorandum says agencies must "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.")
In early March, Obama named Vivek Kundra, Washington, D.C.'s chief technology officer, to the position of federal CIO. Kundra said that he wants "to ensure the public has access to information, and to rethink the way the public interacts with the government in an information economy."
One of his office's projects is the not-launched-yet Data.gov Web site, which is intended to be a warehouse of government data for public consumption. (For the District of Columbia, Kundra's office created the D.C. Digital Public Square Web site, which provides data feeds and even ways to follow government activities through Twitter and Facebook.)
The White House also faces the challenge of upgrading a clunky and out-of-date computer system to allow them to do things like send SMS text messages and mass e-mail updates.
"They're putting out a report," said Schwartz, referring to the 120-day review. "We've had some conversations with the open government people and they seem to be looking at a lot of the issues we think are important."
The Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that advocates for open government, has created a Web site allowing voting on what's most important to see in the 120-day review. The winner so far: formal data standards, which would allow programmers to extract government databases to be incorporated in their own applications--in much the same way as Google's announcement this week does. (Sunlight also was the sponsor of a so-called Transparency Camp in Washington recently.)
Another area that's attracted more attention under Obama's administration than it did under that of George W. Bush is blogging. The White House has a blog (with comments disabled and no actual posts by the president so far). White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has a blog; so does the State Department and Homeland Security (with comments permitted).
What he hasn't done
Overall, though, the Obama administration has been "more talk than action, that's for sure," said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
It's true, Harper said, "that it takes longer to do a lot of the things the president has promised. However, there are things he promised and things he could have done starting on day one that he didn't do."
One of those is adhering to what seems like a simple, unambiguous promise: Obama pledged that he would "not sign any nonemergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days."
That hasn't happened. Obama signed a slew of nonemergency bills without posting them for comment. A chart shows that Obama posted only one of 14 bills for the required five days.
In addition, before taking office, Obama promised new openness in the presidential transition, saying "you can track these meetings" his transition staff had with groups seeking to influence policy. A "Your Seat At The Table" memo said: "This scope is a floor, not a ceiling, and all staff are strongly encouraged to include additional materials."
That didn't happen. Although Obama did disclose documents submitted to the transition staff, his Web site never provided a list of meetings with the names of groups and identities of participants.
Instead, only a list of documents submitted was made public--meaning that if a meeting took place between the transition team and outside groups and no documents were exchanged, it remained secret. And even though meetings with White House staff are generally more important than meetings with transition staff, no similar disclosure policy has been adopted.
This and the WhiteHouse.gov five-day period could be easily fixed, Harper argues. "It's totally within the purview of the president to say what should happen," he said. "And it's not something he said should happen.
Declan McCullagh is a contributor to CNET News and a correspondent for CBSNews.com who has covered the intersection of politics and technology for over a decade. Declan writes a regular feature called Taking Liberties, focused on individual and economic rights; you can bookmark his CBS News Taking Liberties site, or subscribe to the RSS feed. You can e-mail Declan at declan@cbsnews.com. 
The drug war is helping bankrupt this country. Stop the war and bring the troops home. Besides, if everyone was stoned, they wouldn't be as scared by the recession hysteria, or by Republicans, or by the Obamanation.
Excuse me I just realised reality, of course it doesn't.
Even the dope smoking miscreants will eventually turn on him once stagflation ramps up int he next year or so. I'm old enough to remember the Carter years. That was another smug, self-righteous statist who came in like a lion but was ridden out 4 years later, hands bound behind him, sitting backward on the jackass he rode in on.
Well hey, give him a break. 1 out of 14 isn't that bad. 7% compliance is pretty good for a public official of that level.
It was unrealistic to try to be so open in politics. The game simply isn't played that way. He was doomed to failure on those counts before he started, but it was a good campaign promise to get votes from those who don't know any better.
Please leave the commentary out of the article if you're not going to provide evidence. You provided no evidence that the questions about marijuana were not legitimately asked and voted on. I myself voted on at least one marijuana-related question, among many other questions, that I found relevant and insightful. I'm still not satisfied with the President's response regarding the legalization of marijuana; there are many aspects of this issue that he seems to be ignoring.
More on topic, I feel that a lot of the changes that President Obama promised are going to take time to implement properly and securely, especially if you consider the anti-technology sentiment of the former administration. I think 120 days is too short a time to see these major changes implemented, but at this point it would be nice to see that progress is being made in developing secure systems that provide the government transparency President Obama promised us.
You _did_ follow the link, right?
"A Marijuana.com discussion thread says: "Vote for the top marijuana related questions." NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said: "Please take a moment right now to log on the WhiteHouse.gov/OpenForQuestions and vote for the questions above, as well as others pertaining to the need to regulate cannabis. Let the President know that millions of American voters believe that the time has come to tax and regulate marijuana.""
This sounds like a very legitimate way to make people aware of the Open For Questions website, I would be surprised if marijuana-proponent blogs were the only ones that encouraged their readers to vote for the questions that they feel are important. And I would hope more blogs encourage more and more people to participate in Open For Questions for the next online town hall, whenever that will be.
This quote also further proves that these marijuana activists are in no way mischievous. They simply proved that this is an issue that many people feel strongly about. Since it is clear that many people wanted those questions answered, I don't think the President should have brushed it off the way he did. I hope that more and more people vote on these questions so next time, it won't be so easy to shrug off.
Currently, under the Green Jobs and Energy section, the top two questions are both marijuana related. One has 7,190 votes for, and 1,699 votes against. The second has 5,262 for and 1,363 against. For reference, the next question up (regarding solar panels) has 4,584 for, and 391 against. This just shows that the marijuana questions, while they had the most votes, did not have a significantly inordinate number of votes to indicate "mischievous" behavior. That shows only about 2,600 more votes (for reference, the 7th most voted question in this category only had 2,577 votes for) for the marijuana question over the solar panel question, how high does that margin have to get before the President takes it seriously?
Couldn`t they have saved millions of taxpayer dollars and not scared the heck out of New Yorkers by PhotoShoping the plane into a picture.
I AM NOT looking forward to Obama's next 100 days or beyond!
It is funny how irrelevant the right has become over the past 2 years. Stupid nonsense like this is all they have left.
1. Struggling farmers would get back a cash crop they had only 70 years ago
2. No more throwing non-violent pot smokers in jail for 10 years, freeing up space for real criminals.
3. A huge new tax
4. Fewer trees would need to be chopped down
5. Can make fuel additives with it
The list goes on. The bottom line is that it was made illegal at the behest of corporations whose profits were directly threatened by it.
That's why he needed his twin teleprompters at the rodeo... at the frickin' rodeo! That's the funniest damn thing I've ever seen.
- by hempster4twenty August 4, 2009 7:23 PM PDT
- Just one look at the prohibition of alcohol. Look a little familiar? Crime and death in the streets. Not to mention the "easier" creation of organized crime. Unfortunately, legalization will probably never happen because of many reasons. Beginning with all the money to be had with this so called, "War on Drugs". What a joke. Another legal way to imprison, MANY people in the guise of "protecting" the people. The only person this protects is the bad guys by giving them an outlet for making extreme amounts of money. Let's not forget the SUPER wealthy pharmaceutical companies, prison unions, and powerful police who, (think their above the law. i.e. Cookeville police incident) by the way, receives massive amounts of money from the gov. to "house" these "hardcore criminals" that just smoke pot. Ha Ha. How laughable. What is really sad is the majority of the public believes ALL of this "spoon fed" garbage the Gov. Wants you to believe. In short I personally know many people with problems created by the use of alcohol and tobacco. Are these "Illegal"? Of course not. Why you might ask? Ask your local representative. They are more then happy to line there "pockets", oops, I mean war-chests with the money they receive from the respective lobbyists. Is anyone giving them money to end violence and pain caused by this so called "Drug War"? I would have to say "NO". Until we can pay our way out of all this hardship created by the same people who say, "We are doing this to help", we are all just going to have to hunker down and continue to fight this war ourselves the best we can.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(22 Comments)The only way to end this war is to "Legalize".
Just a side note: I know some Growers for Dispensaries, and (by association) Dispensary owners here in California. Who really DON'T want legalization because it will hurt their "BOTTOM LINE". Now how can we expect TV to allow HONEST debate when we can't even trust the one's who wanted "legalization" of medical marijuana just so they can line there pockets with "over priced" product? We have GREED on the "inside" who would like nothing else but to continue selling a $1.60per .05g unit for over $6.00+ a .05g unit. Do we "honestly" think we have a shot with a new (growing more powerful daily) roadblock?