7-20-2001: Washington, One of the central principles of the Bush administration is to be as little like the Clinton administration as possible. On some matters, that's a very good idea. This makes you wonder why Vice President Dick Cheney has been so adamant in refusing to release information about his energy task force.

At the request of congressional Democrats, the General Accounting Office demanded this week that the vice president turn over material on how the administration developed its energy policy and who helped it make its decisions.

Up to now, the administration has argued that doing so would get in the way of internal deliberations and violate executive privilege. In a letter written May 16, David Addington, counsel to the vice president, wrote: "It appears that the GAO may intend to intrude into the heart of executive deliberations, including deliberations among the president, the vice president, members of the president's Cabinet, and the president's immediate assistants, which the law protects to ensure the candor in executive deliberations necessary to effective government."

But guess what? That's more or less what the Clinton White House argued back in 1993 and 1994 when it tried to keep the dealings of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care task force secret. The Clinton Justice Department insisted that the health care meetings needed to be closed "to ensure a frank and unhindered exchange of views or the timely preparation of advice." It added that the "administrative burdens associated with the open-meeting requirement can impede a task force's efforts to proceed expeditiously when the need for particular information arises."

This argument did not play well, especially among Republicans who wondered what the Clinton folks were trying to hide.

"This country has learned, over two centuries, that a free and unfettered exchange in public is the best medicine for any of our nation's problems," Gerald Solomon, then a Republican House member from New York, said in 1993. "And in the end, as the first lady will soon learn, the truth will out."

William Clinger, then a House Republican from Pennsylvania, argued that secrecy was doing the administration more harm than good. "My feeling has always been that they would be better served themselves if this thing was opened up," Clinger said eight years ago. "It's a political embarrassment."

And Tony Snow, the conservative commentator, wrote in a 1994 column: "If the Clinton administration comes to an unhappy end, the president's political epitaph will read: Secrecy did him in." Snow argued that the president "wants to cook up deals, issue orders and take credit -- without interruptions by voters or journalists." Now that's an interesting thought to ponder in 2001.

The critics of secrecy were right. As Haynes Johnson and David Broder wrote in "The System," their book on the failure of the Clinton health plan, "both Clintons came to understand that the secrecy policy had been a serious misjudgment." President Clinton acknowledged that "it created a negative reaction" and added: "In retrospect, I think that was a mistake."

Why should the Bush administration make the same mistake? It's hard to know why Cheney is so insistent on keeping his task force's deliberations out of public view. If we learned that the oil companies and other energy corporations played a large role in the formation of President Bush's energy policy, would a single American be shocked?

Both the president and vice president have been quite open about their sympathy for those industries. Bush is proud to have been a Texas oilman. If the administration believes that the industry's interests and the public interest largely coincide, isn't it better to say so openly?