PRESIDENTIAL PROMISES AND PRETENSES
by Jacob Sullum
Town Hall.com
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
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 promises he made during his campaign. 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?’" Obama said in his SOTU 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.
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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.
The president 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 to the $3.6 he proposed the previous year. The deficit would
drop a bit, from a record $1.6 trillion to around $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, the president 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
by 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 SOTU 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.