Chicago Sun Times
February 4, 2010 Thursday
Final Edition
Broken promises are all Obama has
Jacob Sullum, Special to The Chicago Sun-Times
The day before President Obama delivered his State of the Union
Address last week, the New York Times reported that "aides said he
would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame" for failing
to deliver on campaign promises. If you accept responsibility for
something bad, aren’t you accepting blame by definition?
Not if you’re Barack Obama, who has a talent for accepting
responsibility while minimizing and deflecting it.
"With all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process [for producing
health care legislation] left most Americans wondering, ‘What’s in it
for me?’ " he said in his State of the Union speech. "I take my share
of the blame." For breaking his oft-repeated promise to televise
health- care negotiations on C-SPAN? For agreeing to provisions that
would benefit special interests at the expense of the general public?
No. "For not explaining it more clearly to the American people" — as
if the problem could have been solved with a nifty PowerPoint
presentation.
At his meeting with House Republicans on Friday, Obama conceded that
pointing out his failure to televise health-care negotiations was "a
legitimate criticism." But he also said coverage would have been hard
to arrange because the negotiations occurred in several locations.
Anyway, he said, "overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on
C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings" — as
if he had promised that C-SPAN would continue its longstanding
practice of covering congressional hearings.
He is even less forthright when it comes to the fiscal responsibility
he keeps promising. On Monday, he declared, "We simply cannot continue
to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t
matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be
treated like Monopoly money."
Yet somehow he manages to do so. Obama’s much-ballyhooed spending
"freeze" would affect just one-eighth of the budget, would not begin
until 2011 and would be accompanied by continued increases in outlays
on the president’s pet projects.
If you are serious about reducing spending, you don’t increase it. Yet
Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2011 totals $3.8 trillion,
compared with the $3.6 trillion he proposed the previous year. The
deficit would drop a bit, from a record $1.6 trillion to about $1.3
trillion, only because of increased tax revenue.
Last year, Obama said the deficit, expected to be 11 percent of gross
domestic product this year, would fall to a "sustainable" 3 percent by
the end of his first term. His new budget projections, even with the
benefit of optimistic assumptions, indicate that he will never reach
that goal even if he serves two terms and that the deficit will rise
above 5 percent of GDP after he leaves office.
On Friday, he blamed the economy for his fiscal incontinence, saying
"most of the increases in this year’s budget" were "a consequence of
the automatic stabilizers that kick in because of this enormous
recession."
But as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) noted, legislation signed by Obama
increased domestic discretionary spending 84 percent.
In addition to the health-care transparency and spending restraint he
has failed to deliver, Obama has broken promises to reduce the
influence of special-interest lobbyists; to refrain from raising taxes
on households earning less than $250,000 a year; to cut earmarks to
1994 levels; to take a more modest view of executive power and the
"state secrets" privilege; to close Guantanamo by last month; to end
medical marijuana raids; to allow five days of public review before
signing bills, and to recognize the Armenian genocide. PolitiFact.com
counts 15 broken promises so far, and its standards are conservative.
In his State of the Union address, Obama bemoaned "a deficit of trust
— deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been
growing for years." He blamed the public’s "disappointment" and
"cynicism" on powerful lobbyists, reckless bankers, highly paid CEOs,
superficial TV pundits and mud-slinging politicians. Conspicuously
missing from the list: a president who breaks promises while
pretending he isn’t.