So this meme has come up a lot recently in my life, and I’m trying to figure out where it comes from. There seems to be a Republican meme that the Obama administration is incredibly opaque. This is obviously completely false unless we’re comparing his administration to the administration he was describing while campaigning. But obviously there has to be some balance between transparency and having a massive agency dedicated to putting information on the web.

That said, when you compare the Obama administration to any other administration they’re incredibly transparent. You can get full text of bills, you can get where the recovery money is going. You can get all press releases. You can get their photo archive. You can get unprecedented statements directly from administration officials without press filtering. You can see where the stimulus money is going. You can see all visitors to the white house. Comparing this to the Bush administration is unfair since opacity was definitely their style and they made no apologies for it. But even if you compare this administration to a past administration that really enjoyed communicating with the public, the transparency in the Obama administration is unprecedented.

Yet my father-in-law was in town this weekend and made a crack about transparency and the Obama administration. And in a meeting recently the CEO of my company made the crack that “Our company finances are the opposite of the Obama administration”. It’s a good thing I knew about this meme or I would have had some serious doubts about my employer. So what’s going on? Where did this meme come from? Anyone know?