Gibbs on Transparency: We Kept Our Promise; CNN’s Cafferty: You Lie!
The sparks kicked up by C-Span’s request to televise healthcare negotiations have erupted into a firestorm, as White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was grilled about the President’s campaign promise of complete transparency, and responded testily. CNN’s Jack Cafferty delivered a stinging j’accuse to President Obama, calling the pledge a “lie just to get elected.”
At today’s White House briefing, Robert Gibbs answered another raft of questions about President Obama’s campaign promise to show all healthcare negotiations on C-Cpan. He was testy from the start, referring Chip Reid “to yesterday’s transcript.”
When pressed, Gibbs reiterated his answers from yesterday, asking if the media had lacked information about the healthcare reform process in producing stories. Finally, Fox News’ Major Garrett asked Gibbs if the President kept his promise. The answer he gave was surprising.
“Yes.” That’s not what I got from his answers yesterday. It sounded more like “We did pretty well with that,” a debatable position, but there’s no way to square this with the President’s promise to air everything.
On the other end of the scale sits Jack Cafferty, whose apoplectic comments during the 2008 campaign made him an unlikely darling of liberals. He came out firing at Gibbs and the President, saying the transparency promise was a lie.
While Gibbs is clearly wrong, Cafferty well overstates his case here, saying that President Obama “hasn’t even made a token effort to keep his campaign promises of more openness and transparency.” To be sure, the failures at transparency are big ones, but this administration still has a record of openness that is unprecedented.
The decision to skip formal conference committee negotiations, and not to televise them, is going to continue to cost the administration politically. The calculation here, I believe, is that entrusting the healthcare reform bill to a full conference of a Congress that can’t get out of its own way is a recipe for disaster. If skipping conference saves the bill, it may well be worth all the bad press.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
