There is a good reason the federal government should try to be open and transparent. The public wants it that way. But fewer and fewer only 20 percent, according to a new poll, believe it is. That's down from 33 percent just two years ago.

Openness and transparency is essential to public trust in government, but more and more Americans believe the federal government is closed and secretive; thus, it is reasonable to assume that the level of mistrust is rising as well.

A poll by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University found that almost three-quarters of Americans found the federal government closed and secretive and that the percentage that consider it "very secretive" has doubled to 44 percent from 22 percent in 2006. The next president should make it a goal to reverse that trend.

The poll was commissioned by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in observance of National Sunshine Week, which started Sunday.

Candidates for public office should take note. The poll found that for offices for president, through Congress, governors' mansions and state legislatures right down to the city councils and school boards, Americans, by around 90 percent, rated a candidate's position on open government as somewhat important or very important.

Open and transparent government, then, is not only good public policy, it's good politics too. - Daily News, Naples (Florida)

Obama on race in America

Even before he made what might become a career-defining speech in Philadelphia yesterday, Senator Barack Obama was ahead of his Democratic primary rival, Hillary Clinton, in party delegates and the popular vote.

But that lead was threatened by the specter of race, in recent comments made by Clinton surrogate Geraldine Ferraro, the first female Democratic vice presidential nominee, and in recorded rants by Mr. Obama's longtime minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

With a tough primary ahead on April 22 in Pennsylvania, the Illinois senator addressed the controversy in a speech that drew upon the best traditions of American oratory.

He rejected the black minister's inflammatory comments, placing them in the context of America's conflicted racial history. He also said that his own white grandmother, and by extension other Americans, have avoided the hard work of confronting society's tragic racial assumptions and stereotypes.

As an example of contemporary oratory, it was stunning. As political rhetoric, it was designed to do far more than damage control and, in the end, distilled the essence of his candidacy.

If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination in the most unlikely campaign in American history, chances are good that his Philadelphia speech will have been a watershed moment - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette