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Presidential Promises And Pretenses

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  • Presidential Promises And Pretenses

    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.

    Going Rogue by Sarah Palin FREE

    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.
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