‘Open government’ game has surprise winner
Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006
As much as it pains me to take
exception to remarks by any
candidate who comes out in favor of open government, Asa Hutchinson’s recent challenge to Mike Beebe cannot go unremarked. The Republican gubernatorial candidate seems to think that it would be a mark of good government if he and his Democratic opponent would coordinate the general public release of their answers to the various questionnaires that specialinterest groups send to candidates. “Over the course of the campaign,” Hutchinson said earlier this week, “both candidates have submitted responses to a number of questionnaires and surveys, laying out our plans, positions and promises to a wide range of organizations. I’ve made openness in government one of the key issues of my campaign, and I believe that those surveys should see the light of day so that voters in Arkansas know what promises candidates are making to certain groups in private.” According to our man Seth Blomeley’s account of Monday’s news conference, Hutchinson allowed as to how he’d have to think about whether he’d release his own answers to questionnaires and surveys should Beebe balk.
“The most important thing is to have a coordinated release,” Blomeley quoted him as saying.
Oh, really ? And where do open government and the public’s right to know fall ? Oh, never mind. I keep forgetting that at this juncture we’re really talking about politics, not government, although they’re both pretty much the same thing when you think about it.
But let us not digress.
Hutchinson is to be commended for Monday’s favorable comments about the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, a topic I haven’t heard him mention in a very long time. I agree with him wholeheartedly that “promises made in private that [have an ] impact [on ] the public treasury and the public interest and governing should be open to public inspections when put in writing” (although I might not be so quick to sanction their being made in private, but that’s another column ).
It would please me no end if one of Arkansas’ press groups would send him and Beebe, another professed FOIA proponent, a detailed questionnaire about that issue. I can assure you there would be no good excuse for keeping those responses a secret.
Hutchinson will get no argument from this corner insofar as open government being good government is concerned. Where I draw the line is this business about information coordination. We’ve had 10 years of the coordinated release of information in state government, and frankly, I’ve had about as much of it as I can stand. The situation has become so ridiculous that you don’t ask a state employee what time it is without expecting to be referred to the governor’s office. And now that former newsman Rex Nelson has left Mike Huckabee’s employ, you probably wouldn’t get an answer anyway. I think it has something to do with the Huckabites having included timepieces in the definition of the governor’s working papers or something.
Here’s what I don’t get. Why would Hutchinson think that a coordinated effort would be of the slightest importance, let alone the most important thing ? Is he running out of campaign fodder already ? Surely not, although I’ll concede that to date the race has been pretty lackluster. Hindsight being what it is, I wonder if he realizes yet that instead of challenging Beebe, he should have one-upped him by releasing his questionnaires and then challenging Beebe to follow suit.
Alas, it’s far too late for that. When contacted on the campaign trail by our reporter, Beebe declined to respond to Hutchinson’s challenge, saying he wanted to “stay on message.” A short time later, however, a campaign spokesman said that anyone interested in seeing the candidate’s responses to questionnaires could obtain them via e-mail. The spokesman then promptly e-mailed our reporter Beebe’s responses to eight questionnaires. Hutchinson’s campaign wasn’t able to follow suit with his responses until that evening and thus Beebe one-upped him. If Hutchinson believes the public has a right to know where he stands on the various issues that concern the various special-interest groups that send questionnaires to gubernatorial candidates, he needs to make his answers available to the public without regard for what any other gubernatorial candidates does. “An informed electorate is essential to an effective and functioning democracy,” he said at his news conference. If he truly believes that, he will stop playing political games and so inform us. However, a public renunciation of the dubious open-government policies of the Huckabee administration wouldn’t be unwelcome, either.
—–––––•–––––—Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
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