It is a sad reality that Washington political journalists pay a whole lot of attention to legislators' interaction with other journalists but very little attention to legislators doing what they're paid to do — that is, legislating.

In a post on Power Line blog, John Hinderaker looks at Barack Obama's interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, and he takes the opportunity to offer some deep insights on the fundamentally shallow subjects of horse-race handicapping, political spin control, and election strategy.

In the course of his observations, he lets slip this:

Say what? Where on earth does Hinderaker get the idea that Obama hasn't worked with Republicans?

That's a rhetorical question, because I know the answer. To Hinderaker, as with almost all political journalists, "work with Republicans" means "engage in televised conversations with pro-Republican journalists". It has nothing to do with Republican legislators. Legislators don't count; only journalists.

I challenge anyone reading that article to name two pieces of legislation that Obama was directly involved with that didn't entail working closely with a Republican. Now if you're like 95% of readers (and probably 75% of political journalists, alas) you can't name any legislation that Obama worked on, in which case, excuse me, but you have no business saying anything about Obama's record of working with Republicans because you simply don't know.

If you're among the few who are familiar with some of Obama's legislative work, what are the first bills that come to mind? For me the first two I think of are collaborative efforts with Republicans, one with Lugar and one with Coburn.

Richard Lugar is the senior senator from Indiana, a Republican, and Obama's mentor in the Senate. In September 2006, Washington Monthly published a nice article about their close working relationship. The fact that Lugar is often mentioned as a possible Secretary of State in an Obama administration is an acknowledgment of their closeness.

Lugar and Obama have co-sponsored several bills together, but the famous one — which I would have guessed to be Obama's best-known legislative work in the Senate — is their nonproliferation bill , commonly known as "Lugar-Obama" which created a program to identify and destroy unsecured stockpiles of dangerous conventional weaponry (eg, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles), mostly in the nations of the former Soviet Union, lest they fall into the hands of terrorists.

This bill is one of three featured by Hilzoy in her post about Obama's legislative record. (In my opinion, that post, written in 2006, is still the best blog post about Obama ever. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.)

Among the bills listed without elaboration at the end of Hilzoy's post are the two bills Obama co-sponsored with Oklahoma Sen Tom Coburn. One, which I'm not familiar with (and the link is dead) is a lobbying reform bill. The other, my favorite, is the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA). This is the legislation that created a searchable online public database of all spending by the U.S. government.

These bills highlight two things that top my list of reasons why I support Obama for president. One is the non-partisan nature of his legislation. Not bipartisan, non-partisan. The political media is in love with bipartisanship, but they have a perverse idea of what bipartisanship is. To them, it only exists in an issue which is already partisan and polarized. (To the news media, there is no other kind, because if a political issue is not polarized it's not news.) The "bipartisan", then, is the guy on one side who crosses over and temporarily joins with the other side. The Chris Wallace interview, quoted on the Power Line post that began this discussion, lists several of these, and they're all stupid. Essentially, Wallace asks Obama: Show me a partisan issue where you lined up on the other side.

Obama gravitates toward issues which aren't partisan at all. With all the political issues favored by the media, it's easy to identify the left's position and the right's position. On something like nonproliferation of conventional weapons, you can't do that. It's not as if one party is for it and another is against it. Everyone wants to cut down on loose weapons around the world, it's just a matter of figuring out how to go about it. Likewise with avian flu and most of the others Hilzoy mentions. As for government transparency, that's an issue that's polarized, with many who are for it and many who are against it, but it doesn't cut neatly along party lines.

By most traditional standards Tom Coburn would be considered a far-right conservative and many now think of Obama as a far-left liberal. According to the traditional political narrative they ought to be opponents, but in fact they were natural allies for lobbying reform and transparency legislation. Richard Lugar supported President Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq while Barack Obama opposed it. According to the traditional political narrative, that makes them opponents, but they've found plenty of common ground on foreign policy issues.

It's not a coincidence that Obama works frequently with Republicans; it's a natural consequence of his political modus operandi. It's not that he is a "centrist", a "moderate", or a "maverick" — three labels beloved by the political media. Rather, it's that he instinctively seeks out common ground. His favored approach to any political problem is to say, "OK, we obviously don't agree on those points so let's set them aside for now and concentrate on these other points where we do agree." Traditional politics, abetted by our dysfunctional news media, prefers to set an agenda, line up everyone as for or against it, and then do whatever it takes to make sure our side comes out ahead and wins the fight.

Obama has little appetite for that kind of political confrontation. Such disagreements exist, and when they come up he faithfully lines up on his party's side, but what energizes him is finding the common ground — whether it's issues that are non-partisan to begin with, or by going to core values on big partisan issues in order to find solutions that are agreeable to both sides. This is Obama's pattern, and you see it throughout his political career (and academic career, too), as well as in his writings.

I understand that when you hear phrases from the campaign like "change" or "post-partisanship" or "new style of politics" it sounds like empty sloganeering. I can't say what anyone else means by those phrases, but what this is exactly what I mean by them. And it's my primary reason for supporting Obama for president.

Another thing that leads me to support Obama is embodied in the FFATA. I'm a huge fan of transparency in government, for reasons argued by the late Pat Moynihan and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, but it's not just that. It's about the much larger issue of applying information technology to the federal government.

In the past 30 years we have seen an enormous, world-changing advance in information technology. This more than anything is responsible for the prosperity we have enjoyed for a generation, including improvements reflected in the economy as well as everyday conveniences that don't show up in monetary terms.

This prosperity has come from businesses which have transformed themselves with information technology. Because we enjoy a free-market economy, those business have prevailed, driving out others that failed to adapt. There are, however, chunks of our economy that remain untransformed, and by far the largest of these is the federal government.

In terms of information technology, the federal government is about 15 years behind. There are a lot of reasons for this. The main one is that the government is a monopoly, and as a monopoly it has little or no competitive pressure driving it toward greater efficiency. Two other obstacles are more insidious: Since 1980 a pervasive theme in political thought has told us that government is better when it does less. Unfortunately, while this idea has not proved strong enough to actually eliminate any government programs, it's just strong enough to act as a powerful drag against any effort to make them more effective. Another obstacle for reform is that the same information technology that would make government more effective will also make it more decentralized and less hierarchical, and there are a lot of special interests within government that don't want that to happen.

What this means is that there is an enormous unrealized potential to make government work better by improving it technologically. I've seen this on the county level in my own work. In the course of preparing client's tax returns, I often use county records to look up property transactions and real estate taxes. In theory this is public information in any county, but I have come to discover that some counties do an excellent job of making the information accessible and others don't. (Lucky for me, the two counties where most of our clients own property — King and Snohomish — are among the good ones.)

Public property records are just the tip of the iceberg. There are a zillion tasks that the federal government is called upon to do and better use of information technology can improve its effectiveness for nearly all of them. This translates to lower costs, better services, or both. The fact that this would also move government away from the traditional top-down model and more toward a bottom-up, participatory network is an added bonus. Some may not like this side effect, but I think it's terrific.

Such a transformation is the solution to some of government's dilemmas. Consider regulatory and inspection functions. On the one hand I don't want government to be so hands-off that I don't even know if the food I buy in the store is poisonous; on the other hand, I don't particularly like some bureaucracy deciding what I can and can't ingest. A more modern regulatory structure could be more effectively meet public needs without being so paternalistic.

There is also the largely unrealized potential for communications infrastructure. Compare this with traditional physical infrastructure like our highway system or national power grids. The United States inclines toward private ownership, and there's no reason that should change, but the basic infrastructure was created by national public initiatives. Modern technology has created a wondrous opportunity for a new "American system" for information, but it hasn't yet been realized because, since Reagan, our government has been stuck in the parochial mindset of John Randolph and Andrew Jackson rather than that of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln.

Of all the presidential candidates, Barack Obama is the only one who has made technology in government a central part of its platform. (If you're following the link, the stuff I'm talking about is on the second half of the page, starting at "Bring Government into the 21st Century".) It's not even a matter of comparing Obama's position to the other candidates' positions, because the other candidates don't even have one. Transformation of government isn't even on the radar for them.

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