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Posted
Thursday, January 17, 2008 11:15 AM
| By
Christopher Beam
Lynn Sweet makes a scene over Barack “transparency” Obama not releasing more info in his public schedule:
Last week, after I and some other reporters raised a fuss, the Obama campaign decided to disclose events held in places they deemed "public" and let a pool reporter in to cover. That is laudable. But not enough. For example, today Obama is going to Pacific Palisades--near Los Angeles--for a high dollar elite donor fund-raising event, and the campaign did not deem it worth to put on his "public schedule."
As Sweet has pointed out before, Obama has no problems announcing low-dollar events—it’s the big bucks shindigs that don’t quite fit his man-of-the-people image. In everybody’s favorite formulation: If he won’t disclose his fund-raising events, how can we expect him to disclose his shady White House dealings?
Raising a fuss is what Sweet does best. The first time I saw her, she was berating a Hillary advance person at a sheet metal factory in Las Vegas for refusing to hold a press availability. It was marvelous. The other journalists shrank while Sweet chewed out the staffer. It was like good reporter/bad reporter. (Other, better accounts of this moment here and here.) There was no avail in the end, but not for lack of badgering.
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