Last week, John McCain asked Obama for a favor:

McCain’s Senate office contacted Obama’s office Monday night asking to sign on to a bill opening federal government contracts to public scrutiny, according to three knowledgeable sources.

Before the call, Obama had been working on the measure primarily with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), an ardent proponent of eliminating wasteful government spending and an early supporter and longtime Senate ally of McCain’s.

After learning that Obama and Coburn were introducing the bill without his backing, McCain’s staffers immediately contacted Coburn to express concern and a desire to be named as an original co-sponsor of the update. They then called Obama’s office.

Obama staffers were happy to comply with McCain’s request to sign on, an Obama adviser said, because they knew support from the two presumptive nominees could propel the legislation to passage in the final months of a packed legislative schedule.

In September of 2006, the US Senate passed the Coburn-Obama Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590). The bill was signed into law that December, resulting in a public online federal budget data base of where taxpayers' money is going, showing government contractors, who they are, what they're being paid for what work, and where. USAspending.gov tracks grants and earmarks, too, and will even track subcontractors.

"By helping to lift the veil of secrecy in Washington, this database will help make us better legislators, reporters better journalists, and voters more active citizens," Obama said at the time. "It's both unusual and encouraging to see interest groups and bloggers on the left and the right come together to achieve results. This powerful grassroots alliance shows that at the end of the day, Americans want to see Congress work together to get something done and not continue to engage in the partisan gridlock that so often brings Capitol Hill to a grinding halt."

As Obama observed, bloggers had a lot to do with this bill’s survival. In between its passage and signing, it was buried with a "secret hold":

WASHINGTON -- Teamed with Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, Sen. Barack Obama has scored the biggest legislative victory of his Senate career on a bill to establish federal searchable databases of all government contracts, loans, grants and special-interest spending commonly known as pork.

Coburn of Oklahoma and Obama (D-Ill.) overcame the secret opposition of two powerful Senate veterans, Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), partly because Internet bloggers on the left and right tracked down and disclosed that first Stevens and then Byrd had stealthily put holds on the bill.

Stevens, Byrd back away

Senators have the privilege of putting holds on legislation without their names being disclosed. Usually the leadership doesn't buck them. But, facing criticism in the blog world and in newspaper editorials, Stevens and Byrd--renowned for their ability to snare federal dollars for projects in their states--dropped their opposition.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) also gave credit where it was due: "The group that deserves credit for passing this bill, however, is not Congress, but the army of bloggers and concerned citizens who told Congress that transparency is a just demand for all citizens, not a special privilege for political insiders. Their remarkable effort demonstrates that our system of government does work when the people take the reins of government and demand change," Dr. Coburn said.

The website was launched in December of 2007:

“Today, we mark an important milestone on the path to greater government transparency,” Senator Obama said. “This site helps us to achieve a very simple and powerful vision: a vision that, in a democracy, people ought to know how their government is operating. This isn’t Democratic vision or a Republican vision. It’s a vision that rejects the idea that government actions and decisions should be kept secret.

“We can’t reduce waste, fraud and abuse without knowing how, where and why Federal money is flowing out the door,” Obama added. “This site will provide a window into the federal budget so all Americans can see how their tax dollars are being spent – how their nation’s resources are being used and obligated, where money is going as well as where it is not going. I thank Senator Coburn for his leadership on this effort and for all of the groups who have helped launch this website today.”

“I believe this act is the most important transparency measure passed by Congress since the Freedom of Information Act. I commend Clay Johnson and Jim Nussle at OMB for their tireless work in meeting the first stage of the website’s launch ahead of schedule. This site will help lift the veil of secrecy that covers so much of what happens in Washington and empower ordinary citizens, bloggers and reporters to hold their government accountable like never before. Democracy works when citizens have access to reliable information that can inform their choices,” Dr. Coburn said.

Key features of www.USAspending.gov include:

* A free, searchable website that will track approximately $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans.

* Near real-time updates of data concerning federal spending. Updates can be expected every two weeks instead of quarterly, as is the current practice for existing federal grants information.

* The opportunity for the users to post comments and provide feedback about the website in a public, online user community.

* For the first time, most government spending data will be searchable by contractor or grantee and by congressional district.

* For the first time, grant recipients will receive a unique identifier that will help users track recipients.

* In January 2009, the database will include searchable information about subcontracts and subgrants.

McCain had supported the original legislation, which was nicknamed the “Google for Government” Act. The new bill improving on that provides for full copies of federal contracts to be posted online to USAspending.gov, rather than just summaries of contracts. With both parties’ nominees backing the change, it should have no trouble passing.

A different bill Obama sponsored requires all legislation introduced in the Senate be posted to the Internet four days before a vote including any attached giveaways or earmarks, and allowing no anonymous changes to conference reports. Some of it was worked into the Feingold-Obama ethics bill that passed the Senate with an 83-to-14 vote.

He's also sponsored election protection legislation requiring states to report performance - rate of ballots discarded or uncounted, machine malfunctions, length of time voters wait on line, number of voters redirected to a different polling place, etc. This would be public information, too.

There is much more in this vein. I show these few as examples of what I see illustrates a commitment by Obama (and this shows through his Illinois years, as well) to a more transparent and efficient democracy, and to engaging more and more citizens in their government by giving them means to monitor government.

But a related point, I think, is that the man is a problem-solver. He sees something broken and takes steps to fix it. He does this by persuasion, by interaction, by raising and receiving common sense solutions. And working with the other side: with Lugar on nuclear proliferation and trying to keep loose nukes from falling into the hands of terrorists; with Coburn after Katrina to improve oversight of federal spending.

He is a practical, common sense liberal and a pragmatic idealist, much in the manner of Wes Clark. He wants to get things done and he's not a showboat about it. He does the work and if somebody else takes the credit, that's okay. He was known for that trait as an organizer, as a lawyer, and as a legislator.

Now can he also inspire masses of people? We know he can. But that's not everything to me. I want a more productive government.

Kate Sheppard wrote in The American Prospect last year:

In addition to committing to neutrality on the web, the candidate also laid out his pledges to support policies that encourage greater diversity in media ownership, expand access to broadband, and use technological innovation to address concerns about the economy, health care, climate change, energy, and immigration. But in many ways, his plan is less about tech than it is about technology's political implications, and how the candidate envisions using technology as a vehicle for his greater promises of a new political era in Washington. It aims to use technology as a means of creating a government where these issues are discussed -- and addressed -- with the same kind of open-source, efficient, and user-centric principles that have powered Google.

-snip

"We need to recognize that the government is never going to have the capability of doing with this data as much as the rest of the net and the rest of the interested public," said Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and the founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society who was involved in crafting the Obama plan. "The model of making the data available freely and feeding it into a whole host of competing entities interested in trying to figure out how to make it work better is an important step for the senator to take in really making it possible for his objectives around corruption and making government work to be achieved."

These policies would stand in stark contrast to the past seven years of secrecy and closure in the Bush administration. With a White House committed to wiggling out of disclosure rules and nearly every government agency marred by some level of scandal, a commitment to shedding some sunshine on the basic functions of government would be a welcome departure. Even the information that the public is guaranteed by law has been kept under wraps: two of every five Freedom of Information Act requests were never even processed in 2006, the number of denials increased by 10 percent that year alone. Since 1998, the number of exemptions cited as justification for withholding information increased 83 percent.

More on Obama's ideas on how technology can be used to improve government and enrich democracy can be found here.