WELL, AT LEAST THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS WAS TELEVISED ON C-SPAN
Jacob Sullum

Reason Online (blog)
January 28, 2010

Yesterday I noted that President Obama, in an interview with ABC news
anchor Diane Sawyer, had acknowledged his failure to deliver on his
oft-repeated promise to televise health care negotiations on C-SPAN.
"It’s my responsibility," he said, "and I’ll be speaking to this
at the State of the Union, to own up to the fact that the process
didn’t run the way I ideally would like it to and that we have to
move forward in a way that recaptures that sense of opening things up
more." So how did he address the transparency issue in last night’s
speech? There was this, referring to the health care debate:

This is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more
skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not
explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with
all the lobbying and horse trading, the process left most Americans
wondering, "What’s in it for me?"

Obama did not acknowledge that the public’s suspicion may have been
magnified by his failure to do what he promised to do: make the
process fully transparent, so that everyone knew what was going on
before Congress voted on the final legislation. Instead, as usual,
there was a sense that our elected representatives were deciding our
fates behind closed doors, the better to facilitate all that "lobbying
and horse trading." The C-SPAN coverage that did not happen (that was
in fact blocked by the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate,
with nary a protest from the president) was symbolic of this failure.
Last night Obama was even less forthright in accepting responsibility
for the lack of transparency than he was in the interview with Sawyer,
saying only that he should have explained things more clearly, as
if the problem could have been solved with a really good Powerpoint
presentation.

Later in the speech he bemoaned "a deficit of trust~Wdeep and corrosive
doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years."
He blamed this deficit mainly on "the outsized influence of lobbyists"
and condemned the Supreme Court for making them more powerful by
overturning restrictions on political speech by corporations. He
urged Congress to "pass a bill that helps to correct some of these
problems"~Wa pointless exercise if by that he meant reinstating the
sort of speech restrictions that the Court said cannot be reconciled
with the First Amendment. In addition to lobbyists, Obama blamed
CEOs who earn higher salaries than he thinks they should, reckless
bankers, TV pundits who "reduce serious debates to silly arguments,"
and politicians who "tear each other down instead of lifting this
country up."

Hmmm. Is anyone missing from this list? How about a president
who during his first year in office broke a series of conspicuous
promises, including not just the one about televising health care
negotiations but also the one about changing the way business is done
in Washington by reducing the influence of lobbyists, the one about
"fiscal responsibility," the one about not raising taxes on households
earning less than $250,000 a year, the one about taking a more modest
view of executive power and the "state secrets" privilege, the one
about closing Guantanamo by this month, the one about ending raids
on medical marijuana providers, the one about allowing five days of
public review before signing bills, the one about cutting earmarks to
1994 levels, and even the one about recognizing the Armenian genocide.
PolitiFact.com counts 15 broken promises so far, and its standards
are conservative. In addition to the clearly broken promises, there
are the positions (not quite promises) from which Obama has retreated,
such as his opposition to an individual health insurance mandate and
the Defense of Marriage Act.

I hope that Obama will not think I am simply trying to tear him down
(instead of lifting this country up), or that I am reducing serious
debates to silly arguments, when I suggest that a president who
breaks so many big and small promises, who generally does not own
up to doing so, who persistently misportrays the arguments of his
opponents, and who misrepresents his own policies may bear at least
a little of the blame for the "deficit of trust."