The most pointed question at President Obama’s Wednesday news conference concerned this Los Angeles Times report:

Invoking an argument used by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration has turned down a request from a watchdog group for a list of health industry executives who have visited the White House to discuss the massive healthcare overhaul.

The LAT’s Peter Nicholas pointedly notes that as a candidate, Obama promised that health care negotiations would be on C-SPAN, “so that Americans could have a window into negotiations that normally play out behind closed doors.”

And Josh Orton points out that a promise of transparency in these situations is still on Obama’s website:

Make White House Communications Public: Obama will amend executive orders to ensure that communications about regulatory policymaking between persons outside government and all White House staff are disclosed to the public.

Asked about this at his press conference, Obama gave two answers.  First, he claimed that reporters were present for most of the meetings, meaning they weren’t secret.  Fair enough, but then why not release the records?  Second, he said his administration had sent a letter with a list of the health industry executives he’s met with.

Sure enough, CREW says it received the letter, and posted it on its Web site.  But it says the letter doesn’t satisfy its request.  The group submitted a FOIA request asking for the actual Secret Service visitor records, and it says a letter providing some of the information from those records at the President’s discretion doesn’t cut it.  Besides, CREW says, this isn’t the first suit it’s filed on the issue of visitor logs.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told the LAT and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, respectively, that the administration is “reviewing” the White House policy on release of records.  While acknowledging, as always, that there are certain things any President legitimately needs to keep secret, it’s hard to see why records of visits by industry executives would ever fall in that category.

Beyond the promises candidate Obama made, it’s worth remembering that the President, members of Congress, and everyone who works for them work for us.  We hire the President to work for us, and we give him or her a house in which to live and an office in which to work.  We should get to know who’s going in and out.

As a timely example, here’s a report today from ABC’s Jake Tapper:

Republicans on Wednesday criticized as inappropriate a meeting President Obama held Monday with the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf.

…

…House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement[,] “The issue is whether it was appropriate for the White House to invite him to discuss pending legislation before Congress at all.”

Tapper goes on to report on exactly who was in the meeting, to give the White House’s description of what went on, and to quote Elmendorf’s description from his blog(!).  You may feel it’s inappropriate for the CBO director to have a meeting with the President, you may not.  But we can’t argue about it if we don’t know about it.

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