Scrutiny of a President early in his administration is not new. You test the mettle of the man against what has been said of him and by him in the campaign to see far more than whether he is living up to promise. You are testing to see if something distinct is arising in an administration: policies and processes and programs that will, down the road, stamp an administration as successful or, if nothing else, as a label to be used for an administration no longer in office. So Reagan was the Great Communicator until he became the great smiling face, that all aside from whether he really won the Cold War by outspending the Soviet military, or merely reaped the fruits of a set of policies put in place by Harry Truman. Reagan’s smile remains as well as the empty phrase: “Tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbechev!”, in that it was the Pope’s visit to Poland more than anything else that was the proximate cause of the end of the Iron Curtain.

Obama’s character has been assayed by journalists. He is one cool customer who is a bit taken with his own talent for mastering any body of material that comes before him and spends more time explaining what he is doing than is good for a public that likes to rely on slogans. (Only Fox “journalists” think he is authoritarian, but then that brand of journalist also regarded FDR as a near despot rather than someone just very good at playing the political game both with the electorate and with Congress.) Obama’s political stance has also been assayed by journalists. They view him as much more middle of the road than was the candidate who preached “change” during the primaries. Not that the rhetoric had fooled Hillary supporters who knew that the liberation of voting for a black man was a public emotion that crested after two or three months, and before the final primaries which Hillary won, though by then it was too late to make a difference. Journalists insist on trashing the insights they had a few months before; that way they are never wrong, just smarter than the unnamed personages (themselves) who had said otherwise just a short time ago.

Most recently, Obama has been assailed for being more charm and rhetoric than substance, though that is to neglect the fact that he got us out of the Great Recession, even if not in a sustainable way, the program to restructure the financial sector not likely to hit Congress until next year. That will be a good election year issue, one designed to push the Republicans even more deeply into the hole they have dug for themselves. Here, the journalists are trying to compensate for the adulation they earlier showered upon Obama. It doesn’t work. You have to call it as you see it every single time, just as an umpire is not righting the balance by making a bad call in favor of one team when he had recently made a bad call in favor of the other team. (We have seen a lot of this idea of justice as imposed evenhandedness on the media lately: by political commentators and by baseball umpires.)

Neglected, however, as is the usual case with what is just right there in front of your face, is the remarkable and distinctive approach to the processes of government that Obama has introduced into American politics. Remember that Hillary wanted to shield her health care deliberations from the American people as well as from Congress until she was ready to reveal the results. Remember how the Chaney White House worked hard not to leak what it was thinking about foreign policy even as it was already moving to shift troops from Afghanistan to Iraq. More than that of any President I can think of, with the possible exception of Harry Truman, this Administration is transparent in its processes.

Consider the debate about what to do with Afghanistan. Everybody who cares to listen knows where Biden and Clinton and the other major advisors stand and whether the discussion is drifting in one direction or another, even down to the point, made by Obama, that the position of the Administration may well be decided before the runoff in the Afghanistan election, though not announced until after that.

Consider how remarkable that is. When Adlai Stevenson was identified as on the more dovish end of the spectrum during the deliberations of the Executive Committee that advised JFK on how he should handle the issue of Soviet missiles in Cuba, it was regarded as the result of a dastardly leak meant to put Stevenson in his place or to reveal that the Kennedys did not trust Stevenson whatever he said. That George Ball was identified as a dovish insider was regarded as weakening his influence with LBJ, turning Ball into just a bit of set decoration rather than a voice which had some clout. Now, however, no one thinks that Biden being a dove means he isn’t being listened to. To the contrary, the news magazines tout him as an influential figure because he is taken seriously, as are all the others who sit at the table and whose positions have become known. And Holbrooke’s status appears as diminished precisely because he does not pose as a major advisor, but as someone one rung down from the decision makers. He does not have a publicly well established position on what to do next, though in fact his may be a decisive if behind the scenes voice. In previous years, you didn’t know the views of the important advisors, and that is how you knew they were important, and the advisors whose views you did know, by the same rule, could not be all that important.

The same transparency of decision making is on display in domestic policy. We have seen all the subtle shifts by which health care reform is moved toward legislative realization, even to the point of Harry Reid announcing that he will add the public option to the Senate bill and that immediately reported as a way for Reid to test the waters of whether he can now round up the votes to do so. No specific part of the bill is taken as so ideologically unacceptable that some version of it might not be sold to one or another Senator reluctant to buck his constituents. That is the way Congress is supposed to operate: log rolling, skirmishing around the edges, but finally, with major legislation, in a way Olympia Snowe identified without much eloquence as “When history calls, history calls.” We haven’t seen the legislative process operate so smoothly since Lyndon Johnson called in Everett Dirksen to strike a deal and everybody knew that is what happened ten minutes after the deal was made. Legislating is deal making. Why shouldn’t it be and why shouldn’t legislators be proud they have done well at their craft?

So part of Obama’s legacy that is so quickly taking form is that government need not be hidden from the public but operates best when everyone is let in to see how the sausage is made because then everyone knows how hard it is to get a major bill passed as well as to learn what has been traded off as well as to learn why the final product is what it is, take it or leave it. This is so radical a departure in American government, even if it has been foreshadowed by FDR and by LBJ, that it is well to bear in mind that the Constitutional Convention was held behind closed doors. Opening up government, the idea being that it can take it and that we can as well and that this way lays effectiveness rather than gridlock, is a doctrine with an Obama signature. That is quite an accomplishment for an Administration less than a year old.