After weeks of denials from the White House that the health care reform effort failed to exhibit the transparency President Barack Obama promised on the campaign trail, Obama is conceding that locking the public out of key discussions was a “mistake.”
“We had to make so many decisions quickly in a very difficult set of circumstances that after awhile, we started worrying more about getting the policy right than getting the process right,” Obama told ABC’s Diane Sawyer Monday. “But I had campaigned on process—part of what I had campaigned on was changing how Washington works, opening up, transparency. ...The health care debate as it unfolded legitimately raised concerns not just among my opponents, but also amongst supporters that we just don't know what's going on. And it's an ugly process and it looks like there are a bunch of back room deals.”
Obama said he planned to address the point in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
“The process didn't run the way I ideally would like it to and that we have to move forward in a way that recaptures that sense of opening things up more,” Obama said.
The president called the lack of transparency “my responsibility,” but moments later in the interview he suggested that decisions to handle key discussions in private were made by Congress. - Politico Story
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