Press secs: Obama admin won’t be as transparent as he says

A group of former White House communications aides agreed on Monday that when the Obama administration is ushered in next month, it can’t possibly live up to the standards of transparency and openness that the president-elect and his advisers have promised.

Speaking on a panel at George Washington University, former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan — who angered many of his former colleagues with his recent tell-all book — renewed his charges that the Bush White House was “overly secretive and wanted to keep information a little more closely held.”

He said that the Obama administration “will do more than this administration,” but remaining open will “be a big challenge.”

Ron Nessen, press secretary under Gerald Ford, added that any commitment to transparency “will survive until the first crisis. Then it will be harmful to tell the truth all the time. … You can’t tell all of the truth when the reporters want it. Maybe a little later…”

Don Baer, President Clinton’s director of strategic planning and communications, agreed, referring to the practice as “telling the truth slowly.”

“Any administration starts off wanting to be more transparent,” he said. “The realities of governing mean it’s a lot harder than it looks.”

The first casualty of governing could be the regular press conference. McClellan said he’s heard that Obama would like to do one press conference a month in person. “We’ll see if he can stick to that,” McClellan said.

Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution added that “transparency was not his middle name” when he was running for president, but now suddenly he’s held five press conferences in the month since the election. Hess said he expects them to continue “as long as they’re useful.”

For one thing, the new president may get tired of the personalities in the press corps. “News conferences have become “little dramas,” said Nessen.

“I think there’s a lot of preening,” added Baer.

Nessen also identified a potential flip side for the incoming administration of what’s widely regarded as the press’s light treatment of Obama during the campaign. “There’s going to be some self-examination among reporters about why they went so easy on him, and some will come out of the box wanting to prove their manhood – or womanhood.”