By what metrics should we measure White House transparency? You’d think by what we’ve seen before, no? That sounds reasonable. People would say ‘that George Bush, he was awful…surely, this new fellow can’t be as bad as all that’. It’s an easy win, and it makes sense. Doesn’t it?
Not according to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who, after denying access to White House visitor lists, claimed to waiting reporters that this was ‘not a contest’ between administrations. However much the specifics of one administration vary to another, surely there are always commonalities – there are always threats, there are always policies, some more secretive than others for various reasons, 99 per cent of which are unlikely to involve any kind of exciting conspiracy.
Yet still Gibbs offers this as a justification. Perhaps he thinks that, by saying it, he’s simply goading the press into like-for-like comparisons, pages of coverage on how the White Houses of Obama/Bush/Clinton/Bush stack up in the secrecy stakes. According to the people of CREW, the Bush/Obama administrations are ‘not looking so different right now’ on transparency. Perhaps that’s a good reason to steer off comparisons.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 