President Barack Obama
Photo by Luke Thomas

By David Bryson, MD (Yale ’63), guest editorial

November 10, 2009

It has been almost a year since the Obama Takeover. What bothers me the most is Obama’s poor score on transparency, a promise he made unrelated to the day-to-day items on his plate. Here are five cases of his failure to be transparent:

Emanuel/Blagojevich wiretap

When it was announced that former Governor Rod Blagojevich had been wiretapped speaking with the transition team about his choice for a new Senator to replace Obama in Illinois, all suspicion pointed to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as the man on the phone with Blago. Almost certainly Obama wanted old family pal and confidant Valerie Jarret to take his place in the Senate. When confronted with this superhot disclosure, Obama hemmed and hawed saying he needed time to identify what person or persons had done the talking. When it was finally announced that it was Emanuel and only Emanuel who was caught on tape, with no details added whatsoever, it was Christmas vacation time with Obama in Hawaii and Emanuel on the other side of the planet in Africa – a perfect example of the fog of politics.

Gonzales’ perjury

Once in office, Obama had a choice to investigate probable illegalities of the former Bush/Cheney administration. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for example, lied under oath about the dismissal of federal prosecutors. Obama’s instinct was that “this is now MY White House” – let’s forget the past. This violates his oath of office to uphold the rule of law, the bedrock of official transparency.

Seal snipers assassinate Somali pirates

The shooting of the three pirates in the boat being towed with Captain Richard Philips off the coast of Somalia was packaged as a great triumph for Obama. Yet the rules of engagement allowed lethal force to be used only if the Captain faced sudden/imminent danger. In fact the three shots were fired by Seal snipers not because of new danger, but because the pirates accidentally positioned themselves in the gunsights of the snipers. Obama could have told the truth – we faked out the pirates – they couldn’t see the snipers in the dark. Instead, Obama & Co. spun the fiction that the Seals were forced to fire at that moment. Quite unnecessarily and misleadingly, the Commander-in-Chief trumped transparency.

Minimizing the importance of a public option

A few months ago Obama said that the public option was central to health care reform. Then, as his plan was being trashed and sausaged, he told us the public option was only a “sliver” of health care reform, holding his thumb and index finger less than an inch apart to emphasize its non-essentiality. This 180-degree about-face was not explained or discussed.

Obama has told us several times that, unlike the media, he is not linked to the 24/7 news cycle. This is absurd. After Obama jumped into the pissing contest and criticized Officer James Crowley’s arrest of Professor Gates, greatly inflaming the media firestorm, he then appeared the very next morning to backtrack on his mistake. Obama created the Beer Summit and its #1 rating in the 24/7 news world.

“To the victor belong the spoils.” This old saying can be revised – “The victory spoils the victor.”