"Open Government"

Over the last few days I have become somewhat more interested in the marijuana legalization movement. This renewed interest is due mostly to what has been taking place on the Obama transition team's website: change.gov. The team has been taking suggestions and questions from the general public through the site for the last month and a half or so. They also have a satellite site called the Citizen's Briefing Book, where people can submit and vote on suggestions for the new president to look at.

Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly), there is one question/suggestion that keeps making it to the top of the list: the legalization and regulation of marijuana. As I write, this is is by far the top voted suggestion on the citizen's briefing book. It is difficult to find actual lists of the results of the change.gov question voting on short notice, but here are a couple of websites discussing the results of the first and second round of questions as far as the topic of marijuana is concerned. Marijuana legalization placed first and fourth in rounds 1 and 2 respectively for most highly voted questions. There are a number of reasons listed in the comments as to why people think this should happen, but I am not going to go into the details here. My purpose is rather to analyze the reaction of the transition team to this particular topic.

You can view the responses of the Obama team to some of these questions on the change.gov website itself, but to summarize, in both rounds the response was a curt

"President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana."

I can only draw a couple of different conclusions from the fact that this question is being ignored.

The most probably explanation in my opinion is that the Obama team thinks that a bunch of potheads rallied on the internet to skew this whole online voting thing in their favor and that if they ignore the issue it will just go away after a while. Additionally, they don't view the issue as anywhere serious enough to Obama's popularity to even attempt to address it with a thoughtful response. I mean, it really wouldn't have been too difficult to give something canned like:

President-Elect Obama recognizes the importance of taking a close look at the failure that is the war on drugs. However he feels that there are much more pressing issues facing the nation at the moment that must be dealt with first

This is, of course, a non-answer, but it at least wouldn't have been as much of a snub at the people asking the question. The fact that the question didn't even deserve a bullshit answer is blatantly insulting to a (I believe) significant number of Obama supporters who grow increasingly angry and who want answers.

The other possibility for why this question was ignored, is that the Obama team is too politically afraid of appearing sympathetic to a marijuana legalization movement in any way.

This is not the only issue being ignored by the Obama team. The top question from round 2 concerning whether Obama would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate some of the crimes of the Bush administration was basically answered with a written sound bite.

There are a number of video "reactions" on the citizen's briefing book website to some of the ideas suggested there. As you might have guessed, the ideas were chosen not by vote count, but more so by which ideas already aligned with what the Obama team was going to do anyway. This provides the illusion of input into a system that in reality is already decided and closed off.

I am not one to advocate a tyranny of the majority, but when very popular questions are ignored by a government that claims to be listening, well I have to wonder if we voted for change, or simply the comfort of a more subtle deception.

This really isn't about marijuana legalization or justice anymore, it's about a government that professes openness and honesty, but then hides behind sound bites and single sentences when faced with questions apparently too difficult to properly answer. I can't think of a better word to describe this than "hypocrisy."