Every elected official is a potential enemy of the people.
That should be every free citizen’s abiding premise. No matter how good and noble and well-intentioned politicians and representatives are, they can’t entirely resist the blandishments of power and privilege for very long. The lesser temptations of the system steadily become part of the daily air they breathe.
This is why the Founders inserted freedom of the press in the First Amendment — not because they respected journalists (they despised them), but because they understood that centralized government made it hard for the people to know what officials were up to in the corridors of power. Opacity was understood as the ally of corruption, transparency the enemy. Journalists were to be the watchdogs.
Obama voiced the point again and again last year, as this compilation shows. In it, Obama pledges to bring negotiations about health care to C-SPAN, to make the process a public one. Why, then, aren’t the health-care debates going to be televised? Brian Lamb, head of the network, has written a letter to leaders of Congress on both sides asking for the rights to broadcast. He says:
“As your respective chambers work to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate health care bills, C-SPAN requests that you open all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings, to electronic media coverage.
“The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of these sessions LIVE and in their entirety. We will also, as we willingly do each day, provide C-SPAN’s multi-camera coverage to any interested member of the Capitol Hill broadcast pool.”
Here is Andrew Ferguson describing one response:
“When Lamb’s letter became public a week later, a spokesman for Senate majority leader Harry Reid responded with a lightning strike into irrelevance: ‘What should truly concern the American people is the Republicans’ shamelessly transparent strategy to stop reform at all costs by relying on misinformation and myths. Their ploys are broadcast on C-SPAN for all of America to see.’”
Lamb himself has criticized Obama for using the C-SPAN name last year but not living up to the commitment.
Several years ago, people rightly criticized the Bush Administration for keeping energy policy discussions secret. (The task force was led by Vice President Dick Cheney, and lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests were filed by environmental and legal groups.) People on the left and the right should speak out once more against the closed-door tactics and write their representatives sharp letters of protest. The more politicians claim the necessity of confidence, the more suspicious citizens should be.
8 Responses to Obama and C-SPAN
stinkcat - January 15, 2010 at 7:17 pm
I wonder why the left is so silent about the lack of the promised transparancy? This special deal with the unions on the health care tax is a prime example of how important the transparency is.
suomynona - January 16, 2010 at 9:16 pm
I would like to see this administration be more transparent in a few ways, certainly including letting us see the entirety of these debates on C-SPAN. But, frankly, it’s the ignorance and ineptitude of the American voter the really prevents this from happening. The only reason I can think of for the White House to keep the debates private is that some of the positions and compromises required by Dems to get a bill roughly resembling what they want could be politically compromising. In other words, more ‘death panels,’ ‘government’s trying to access your bank account,’ ‘socialized medicine,’ ‘taking away your private insurance’ hyperbole. In other words, whether it’s actually true or not, any broadcasted information can be twisted into some kind of great scare or demagogeury. And this is the fault of the ignorant and lazy voter as much as it is the politicians, because we’re the ones who let them get away with such sh*t. Can’t have democracy with our degree of mass abdication of social responsibility.
stinkcat - January 17, 2010 at 8:55 am
“The only reason I can think of for the White House to keep the debates private is that some of the positions and compromises required by Dems to get a bill roughly resembling what they want could be politically compromising.”I suppose that this kind of thinking makes sense to a liberal when the liberals control both the white house and the congress. However, if the message is: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, why didn’t Obama campaign on such a platform rather than promising transparency?
suomynona - January 17, 2010 at 12:16 pm
“However, if the message is: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, why didn’t Obama campaign on such a platform rather than promising transparency?”The short answer is that obviously politicians campaign on lots of things that they either cannot accomplish because of the process or never had any genuine intention of accomplishing in the first place. Obama may well have wanted transparency (or not); he may still want transparency (or not); but if his cabinet and his party were to insist that it’s political suicide, the president has to choose his battles carefully (something Obama seems pretty damn good at doing so far). And I understand that part of the conservative dystopic fantasy is the idea of the mysterious puppeteer orchestrating a vast, overreaching government toward diabolical ends; but the president if the United States is still the most visible person in the world. It’s this visibility that makes the president (all US presidents) so vulnerable to the demagoguery of the opposition. This is the same old self-defeating cycle for the American public: the politicians are smart enough to give us information selectively, because the more information we get, the more the demagogues have to spin lies and induce paranoia. If we had a capable enough electorate to call out the bs, we’d have more politicians taking unscripted questions from regular citizens (similar to UK’s Question Time) and treating us all like adults, in my opinion.
suomynona - January 17, 2010 at 12:18 pm
…needless to say, bit ifs are invovled.
stinkcat - January 17, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I would hardly argue that Obama is any sort of puppetier. I don’t think he is that competent to be one. After all, he has 60 votes in the senate and yet he has to go campaign for a the people’s seat that was formerly held by Ted Kennedy? Something is clearly out of whack if he has to do that.
blueconcrete - January 18, 2010 at 8:10 pm
@ stinkcat,There is no actual, unified group in the U.S. known as “the left” or “liberals”; they’re an imaginary bugbear invoked by some conservative commentators (and audience). You need only look at the composition of the Democratic caucus to understand. It includes progressives and conservatives, moderates and corporatists. Many members of the left-leaning blogs I frequent daily have been vocal about the lack of transparency from the Obama administration. Liberal commentators like Glenn Greenwald have, in fact, been documenting lack of transparency since Obama took office.
davi2665 - January 20, 2010 at 1:18 pm
It must be difficult to create the mental gyrations to justify the Obama campaign promises that he either never intended to keep, or that he found inconvenient to keep (i.e. CSPAN transparency, no added costs in health care, etc). In my book, this is called dishonesty. And, of course, commenters such as suomynona can just blame the victims, the poor stupid Americans, to be held in such contempt for not being able to understand the need for manipulative politicians to perpetrate such dishonesty “for the common good.” And we certainly want to sweep under the rug the bribery of senators for their votes on health care with cushy benefits for Nebraska, Florida, and Lousiana, while passing on the costs to the poor ignorant populace of other states who will be saddled with the bill. The corruption, lack of integrity, backroom deals, and chicanery are utterly disgusting at any level; but what is really disheartening is to listen to the supporters of the great messiah try to excuse all of this in the name of his great Marxist ideals. Pay heed to what happened in Massachusetts- without an abrupt change in direction, similar results will occur around the country. That is, unless we decide that the poor stupid Americans referenced above are deemed unworthy of making such important decisions as who should represent them in Washington.