First Week, The

From Zanecorpwiki

First hundred days? Try first week:

• Obama tells all agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure
• Guantanamo and secret detention centers closed
• Halt all Bush regulatory changes pending review
• WhiteHouse.gov opened for search (by Google, et. al)
• repudiates changes to the Presidential Records Act made under Bush (analysis and history)
• releases general memorandum on open and transparent government

There's a lot of hard work ahead, and there's no doubt things are going to be rough for awhile. We've been on a downward path for quite awhile, and I'm glad Obama didn't start with pronouncements on policy for this or that problem. Like an alcoholic, the first step is an honest look at things and saying, We have a problem. Stop hiding, stop the excuses. Bring the issues to the light, and then deal with them.

Perhaps that's what Obama's win--beginning with and perhaps particularly in the primaries--was all about. More than just new policies, maybe it was at that point that the nation began to put into action a new mindset.

I'm the guy that on the day of inauguration didn't even want to listen to the speech because I was tired of talk. I worried that people were making Obama out into some sort of savior. I still have that fear. Obama is not going to fix the nation's economic woes, the cultural divide, our foreign relations mess, get us out of two wars, or bring peace to the Middle East. These are problems for all of us.

What he can do--and what the Bush administration utterly failed to do--is engage the nation on these issues. Whether or not it was immoral, it was certainly irrational to say, Don't worry, don't look, don't ask, don't bother. It was a strategy that dis-empowered us all. Instead of channeling the energy and potential of this great nation, we were set one against the other to expend our energies in an endless game of blame and childish jealousy.

What I sincerely hope I'm seeing here, the news that has made me feel a part of something from which I had long been alienated, has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with engagement. It's about a belief that you fix problems by looking at them. A famous quote attributed to an unnamed, high ranking Bush official in 2004 proposed the idea that power is a means to create truth. This was a seductive, dark and dangerous vision of empire. I hope that what I'm seeing now is the repudiation of this doctrine in favor of the idea that truth is not an end to be manipulated, but a means to a better world.

Follow Up

I still believe that this represents a real change, but I have to say I'm disappointed that Obama failed to act on the first test of transparency. The Bush administration has withheld millions of emails, first claiming they were lost, but then--when they realized that losing the emails was illegal--conveniently found them but refused to hand them over. Obama had an opportunity to follow standard procedure and release the emails into the national archives, but failed to do so.