Tonight, President Obama will deliver his fourth State of the Union address, and we'll be watching to see how his reform and transparency ambitions fit within this most public description of the President's priorities.* In an election year when an anti-Washington campaign theme will still be required, Obama may continue to cast his transparency work as a list of achievements, rather than an affirmative vision for accountable government.

Here are some themes from Obama's (first) campaign, his Presidency, and previous State of the Union addresses, that could be rejuvinated tonight:

Campaign Finance Transparency:

As we noted last year, Obama directly confronted the Supreme Court Justices in 2010 (shortly after the Citizens United decision), and then avoided campaign finance transparency altogether in 2011. The 2012 State of the Union could see Obama revive the issue from the bully pulpit. Almost nothing was done by Congress during 2011, a year when Congress failed at even defending a draft Executive Order that the President requiring disclosure of political giving from government contractors. The issue is still rife for Presidential engagement, though -- people hate the Citizens United decision, and it should be easy to rail against negative ads and dark money in our elections.

The issue could be awkward for Obama, whose former staffers started their own super PAC to aid in his re-election. Even if Obama and his party are to be the beneficiaries of the often secret, unlimited contributions they have warned us about in the past, the President still has a responsibility to push the issue.

Lobbying Disclosure

Obama loves to rail against lobbyists, and they've been a staple of previous campaign rhethoric, SOTU addresses, and White House policies. Lobbying disclosure and lobbyists will likely come up again this year, especially as cashing in on public service has become a disputed theme in the Republican presidential contest. We'll be watching to see whether Obama articulates any kind of affirmative vision for lobbying disclosure, or whether he adopts a "we already did that" posture like he did last year.

The White House has certainly done a great deal on lobbying disclosure, but their work too often relies on the flawed statutory definition of a lobbyist, which is weak, easily evaded, and fails for the most important of influencers.  An affirmative vision for reform is necessary.

Earmarks

Obama pushed for Earmark disclosure in the 2010 SOTU, and then issued a flat veto threat in 2011.  Unfortunately, neither approach has worked, and the supposed ban has made earmark requests a dark art, rather than the subject of public debate. The White House has been reportedly circulating a draft EO on earmark request disclosure, which Sunlight has pushed for extensively. Today would be a great day to issue an updated Executive Order, to protect merit in spending decisions, and keep Members of Congress from strongarming agencies into supporting their pet projects, while often pretending to be opposed to money from Washington.

Working with Congress

After the last year of Continuing Resolutions, near government shutdowns, the debt limit fight, and the supercommittee, watching the heads of divided government share a dais should be entertaining. Political gamesmanship has led the leaders of both parties to break campaign promises (72 hours for all bills, or "end[ing] the practice of writing legislation behind closed doors").

I don't expect Obama to raise the bar on negotiating with Congress, but he should. The frustrated-with-Washington undercurrent is about a variety of different things, and party leaders' tendency to choose each other over the public is near the top of the list. The reset button needs to be pushed for how party leaders approach divided government. The political moment of the State of the Union probably is an insufficient occasion to force such a reconsideration.

Wild Cards

If Obama wants to discuss transparency in his SOTU, there are a variety of other issues he could address in his speech. He could run through the oft-recited litany of White House achievements, like the Open Government Directive, Data.gov, the visitor logs, the Open Government Partership, and while they each have their failings, they're still successes the White House should highlight.

National Security secrecy, transparency in the finance sector, and the ongoing struggle to strengthen the FOIA could all come up in the speech as well.

We'll be watching, and have reactions after the address.

*Update: please join us at SunlightLive.com for our live coverage beginning at 9 pm ET.

There are almost 27,000 people—or 1/100th of one percent of the United States population—who spent more than $10,000 to influence elections during the 2010 election cycle.

The top 10 people from this elite class of donors together spent more than $23 million on the last election. The majority of that money went to Super PACs used for independent expenditures. Eight contributed their money exclusively to Republican groups and candidates; two contributed exclusively to Democratic groups and candidates.

In total, this tiny group of relatively unknown individuals was responsible for $774 million of the $3.2 billion that poured into the hotly contested mid-term elections. That money went not only to candidate campaigns and political action committees, but to Super PACs, officially known as “independent expenditure-only committees.” After the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United and the Federal Election Commission’s two advisory opinions that followed, individuals and corporations effectively have unlimited giving potential. By giving to Super PACs, they can bypass traditional giving limits.

The group that benefited most from the top 10 mega-donors largesse: American Crossroads. That Super PAC received millions of dollars from seven of the top donors, and $7 million from just one donor, Bob Perry.

Here’s a look at who’s who among America’s top 10 most influential givers:

1. Bob Perry is the CEO of Perry Homes. Perry has been influential in politics and a prominent donor for a number of years. In 2004, he gave $8 million to a number of nonprofit political groups known as 527 committees. Most notably, $4.4 million of that money went to the political group Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, which opposed Sen. John Kerry’s presidential bid. During the 2010 election cycle, Perry donated $7.3 million to political efforts. All but a small portion of his money for the 2010 election went to American Crossroads, a group cofounded by former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie.

2. Wayne Hughes, owner and chairman of Public Storage, Inc. According to disclosures, Hughes gave a total of $3.28 million to conservative candidates and committees, with $3.25 million going to American Crossroads. Hughes also gave $4,800 to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.

3. Fred Eshelman is the CEO of Pharmaceutical Product Development. Eshelman spent $3 million in 2010 funding his own group, RightChange. RightChange registered with the FEC as a Super PAC and spent those millions of dollars to defeat Democratic candidates including Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington.

4. Robert Rowling, CEO and Chairman of TRT Holdings, a holding company that owns Golds Gyms and Omni Hotels as well as oil and gas interests. Rowling spent $2.59 million during the last election on conservative efforts. He gave $2.5 million of that money to American Crossroads.

5. Donald Sussman is the Chairman of the holding company Paloma Partners. Sussman, who earlier this year married Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, gave $1.26 million in 2010 to Democratic candidates. He has also funded a group called the Democracy Fund, a separate but predecessor organization to the United Republic Action Fund. Both of these groups have been affiliated with United Republic, and both have been dissolved.* Sussman gave a little more than $750,000 to the Super PAC Women Vote! and its parent organization Emily’s List. Those two organizations support pro-choice female political candidates.

6. John Ricketts is the founder of TD Ameritrade and still a board member there. In 2010, his total political contributions were $1.25 million. He gave to a variety of Republican candidates, including House Speaker John Boehner.

7. Jerry Perenchio is the CEO of the investment firm Chartwell Partners and former owner of the Spanish-speaking television network Univision. In 2010, he gave $1.12 million to conservative candidates and groups, including $1 million to American Crossroads.

8. Trevor Rees-Jones is the president of Chief Oil & Gas. In 2010, he gave $1.1 million to Republican efforts. $1,000,000 of that was given to American Crossroads.

9. Rachel Hunter is the Treasurer for the organization Media Matters and an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune. She’s related to Penny Pritzker who was the national finance chairwoman of the Obama campaign in 2008. In 2010, Hunter gave more than $1 million to democratic groups and candidates. The bulk of that money went to the 527 organization, Bring Ohio Back.

10. John Childs is on the Board of Directors for Club for Growth and is the founder of JW Childs Assoc., a private equity firm. In 2010, he gave a total $923,000 to Super PACs supporting Republicans and to Republican candidates directly. He gave $100,000 of that money to American Crossroads and $650,000 to his own group, Club for Growth.

For a full list of the top donors for 2010, see the embedded spreadsheet below.

Also, as a disclaimer, we think it is important to note that there are funders of the Sunlight Foundation on this list. For example, David Bonderman and Marjorie Roswell are numbers 9 and 103 on the list and have donated to the Sunlight Foundation. Additionally, the founder of the Open Society Foundations, George Soros, is 134th on the list. Open Society Foundations has provided grant support to Sunlight.

*Based on inaccurate information received from a source at United Republic, we originally reported incorrectly that Donald Sussman is a funder of that organization.

Tonight the Sunlight Foundation will cover President Obama's 2011 State of the Union using our award-winning Sunlight Live platform of real-time investigative reporting. We will provide real-time transparency of the annual State of the Union and make our analysis participatory in a way we couldn't have before the Web. We invite all citizens to join us and submit questions as we live-blog, fact-check on-the-fly and provide contextual analysis about the influences shaping President Obama's statements at the moment they are spoken.

The unified Sunlight Live page brings together the speech's live streaming video, contextual data, reporting and social media. Sunlight's Reporting Group is joined by The Huffington Post, National Journal, CQ Roll Call and the Center for Public Integrity. We believe this expanded and accomplished team will be the most comprehensive live coverage available with insight to the proposals, people and policies mentioned during the speech. The Sunlight Foundation is committed to sharing this platform and encourage others to embed it on their own sites.

The fun begins at 8:30 pm EST at http://www.sunlightlive.com.

We hope you join us.

Politico has an excellent round-up of the many Silicon Valley executives who orbit around the White House giving advice on a range of policy issues. One thing that the article could use is some context as it relates to the campaign contributions that went from these tech companies to the President's campaign in 2008. One way to insert that context is to run the article through the Sunlight Foundation tool Poligraft.

Poligraft checks the names in the articles to databases of campaign finance and lobbying and prints the context along the side of the article. For this Politico piece, the article needed one simple addition for Poligraft to work properly: the name Barack Obama. With this small edit the article, for which you can see the Poligrafted version here, pops with influence information.

Now you can see that the all of the companies named in the article contributed to the President's 2008 campaign. You can also see that they all contribute to President Obama's chief gadfly, Rep. Darrell Issa.

Check it out.

Copies of the SOTU speech are now circulating and there are several things in it that Sunlight is extremely happy about.

First, the President will call for the establishment of a single Congress-wide database so that all of us can track earmarks. A state-of-the-art, user-friendly online database, one that allows users to search, sort, and download machine-readable data, will spur more citizen interest and involvement  -- and accountability -- in federal budgetary questions.

Sunlight has long advocated transparency to ensure that earmarks reflect the public interest. There is a long history of members abusing earmarks, requesting funding to build bridges to nowhere and to reward political allies, family members and even for personal enrichment. These abuses were most prevalent when there was little transparency in the process. Until 2007, members did not disclose which earmarks they requested, recipients were not named and individual earmarks were scattered throughout a dozen or more congressional committee documents that totaled hundreds of pages.

While the last two Congresses have improved earmark disclosure, it’s still impossible for a citizen to find, in a single place, all the relevant information about the projects their elected lawmakers request before votes are taken on them. What the President is requesting -- a centralized database with information posted before final decisions are made -- is a much-needed change.

Second, the President is calling for more complete disclosure by lobbyists when  they are lobbying the White House or Congress. Under his plan, each contact would be reported, presumably with enough specificity to be meaningful.  Sunlight believes strongly that such disclosures should be made electronically, published promptly and maintained online in a downloadable, searchable, sortable format. We believe that disclosure should include all legislation and regulations discussed and all requests for specific services or government funding. Legislative contacts should be reported within 24 hours of any meeting. In addition, the requirement that contributions by registered lobbyists be reported semiannually should be amended to require contributions be reported within 24 hours of being made.

And third, the President calls for fixes to the campaign finance system in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. We believe that this decision certainly calls for an immediate update to the entire campaign finance disclosure law regime — covering everything from who has to disclose, what is required to be disclosed, how often, and in what form – whether the spending comes directly from corporations’ or unions’ treasuries, from lobbyists, political parties or the candidates themselves. Clearly, now more than ever, our entire system of public disclosure of election-related contributions and expenditures needs to be upgraded to keep pace with the influences it is designed to track. And with the technical capacity we now have in this 24/7 world, this means that disclosures must be filed online, in real time.

We applaud the President for making these new initiatives and stand ready to consult with Congress and the administration to find the best technical means to accomplish these goals.

Excerpts from the Speech below:

Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it's time for something new. Let's try common sense. Let's invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let's meet our responsibility to the people who sent us here.

To do that, we have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now. We face a deficit of trust - deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve.

That's what I came to Washington to do. That's why - for the first time in history - my administration posts our White House visitors online. And that's why we've excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.

But we cannot stop there. It's time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my Administration or Congress. And it's time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office. Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign companies - to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.

I'm also calling on Congress to continue down the path of earmark reform. You have trimmed some of this spending and embraced some meaningful change. But restoring the public trust demands more. For example, some members of Congress post some earmark requests online. Tonight, I'm calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single Web site before there's a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent.

Here’s some welcome news. Yesterday, President Obama issued a memo calling on his administration to conduct what The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder termed “a bow-to-stern review” of the government's secrecy policy. The president tasked his attorney general and Homeland Security secretary to head a task force that will work to improve federal agencies’ sharing of unclassified national security information when appropriate. And he directed them to restore the Clinton administration’s “presumption against classification” that the Bush administration had ended. Last week, in a speech at the National Archives, Obama promised he would be launching a review of current policies by all of those agencies responsible for the classification of documents to determine where reforms are possible.

As DemocraticLuntz, after reading Obama’s memo, wrote on Daily Kos, “the goal is to declassify early, declassify often, and declassify in an efficient, orderly, manner, while still keeping classified those things which are truly necessary to be classified for national security purposes.” The Washington Post quoted Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and Sunlight friend, praising the move as a way to set the wheels in motion. "This is music to the ears of many of us," Aftergood said, "but the hard work remains to be done -- how to translate these goals into policies."

Maybe, just maybe, they are serious about “operating with an unprecedented level of openness.” We continue to see signs of it.