Argh I asked for your arguments and opinions cause I don't want to play quote wars and fact check bickering in this thread. If you had given me some examples (and not something you linked to) I would take you at your word and debate the meaning of what you said if I disagreed but not dispute the factual basis of it.*
Given what I asked for in the rules, I won't comment on the link(s). To your question, I think he's done an OK job with transparency. I haven't been reason to doubt it yet but I'm willing to listen.
*Keep in mind I've already accepted your arguments about Obama failing to manage congress and it didn't require linked articles to do so. I considered and accepted your arguments at face value. Again, I don't want people to make stuff up and I trust that we won't, but I don't want quote/link/fact check wars in this thread.
The question of transparency is about to what extent can the public see what the government is doing. Remember that the government is ours, we are not theirs. They are the servants, we are the masters.
Now, that said, we delegate immense powers and authority to these people. But, having done so, it is our responsibility to monitor how they use that power, and force changes as necessary.
Now this is complicated by the
reason that we delegate this authority to them. What these various advocates of "direct democracy" don't get, (or sometimes they do, and that's even worse) is that familiarizing yourself with all the issues that government addresses, worse still, the nuts and bolts of the hows and whys government does, should do, and should not do, what they do, is actually one hell of a lot more work than a 24/7/365 job.
In short, nobody could do it. It's just too much. It's just beyond human capacity.
And so we delegate to those we elect. And those we elect delegate to those they appoint. And those they appoint delegate to those they hire.
In that sense, the extreme libertarians almost have a point. Almost. Because all of that delegation takes things out of the realm of having the people who are
ultimately in control being
actually in control. Where their point falls apart is what I mentioned earlier: No one person could master all of what government does to make all these decisions.
And that includes Obama, or whoever else is president at the time. Carter was famous as a micromanager. He was also famous for not actually getting much of anything done. Reagan was famous for not having much of any interest at all in what his subordinates did, or how they did them. He was also famous for one of the most corrupt and incompetent administrations in modern times. Obama is somewhere between the two.
Now Obama has to delegate, and the people he appoints has to delegate. So did the decisions on the IRS scandal, the AP scandal, the Bengahzi scandal come from Obama? No, they came from 2-3 steps removed from anything Obama actually made a decision on. We may say "the buck stops here", meaning with him is ultimately the responsibility. But the modern political rhetoric has lost sight of the difference between "responsibility" and "fault". As in, he may ultimately be responsible, but he is not at fault for causing the events we call scandals.
Now how does that lead into transparency? It's this: Obama is not the top of the food chain. We are. The ultimate responsibility is not Obama's, it is ours. And we are at an even further remove from what is going on than Obama is.
The president has a sizable staff to keep him informed and help him understand any issue that he thinks he needs to know about. In fact, ultimately, he can question pretty much any federal employee for information concerning what is going on. But, ultimately, he can't work on it 24/7/365 either. The human mind needs breaks. And so most of what actually happens is delegated.
Now in the IRS scandal it's coming to light that Obama's top people in the White House chose to keep Obama in the dark even after they knew that this was starting to blow up. That's a price you pay for delegating to the wrong people or giving them the wrong instructions.
OK, so having delegated through so many layers, how do you know that what people are doing is what you want them to be doing? Well, in a word, transparency. The more open the system is to public scrutiny, the more someone will notice when something goes wrong. The job of the press, and why the Founding Fathers gave the press so much protection in the very first of the Amendments to the Constitution was that they understood this. They understood that the voter was the ultimate boss of the government, and to keep that government under control, to keep checks and balances operating, the press had to be free to operate and tell the public what the government was doing.
If we are going to let the voters decide, the voters need to be well informed. Or, at any rate, as well informed as possible. And so the press must have access, and so the press must have the liberty to act to inform others.
Now when you have a government that freezes the press out, or worse, one that restricts, investigates, or intimidates, the press, now you have lost the ultimate check and balance on the power of government.
The information that the government has is the property of the people of that nation. Now we allow a lot of restrictions on what information can be released. But we always need to keep in mind that we have to balance the needs of confidentiality with the responsibility of keeping the public informed so that they can choose. All to often you get public officials suppressing information, not because there is a valid need for confidentiality, but rather because they think the public will react in ways harmful to them if the information goes public.
Covering their own asses rather than serving the public interest.
And an awful lot of this is policies that Obama inherited as part of the "war on terror", which are really above any beyond what it is in the national interest to keep secret. But it is a convenient excuse. Now more than ever we need to know what the government is doing. And we don't.
And that, ultimately, is the biggest risk to our future safety and prosperity as a nation.