The question then becomes, how much of that is Obama’s fault, and how much is the Republican Congress’ and their “to hell with anything Obama proposes” attitude’s fault?
That means it’ll be proposed. He’ll consider it. He’ll ultimately decide to run.
THe biggest broken promise was that he’d be a different kind of politician. His message, hammered home in statement after statement criticizing the McCain campaign was, “That’s an example of the old politics. Americans want change.”
Obama wasn’t just running to implement democratic policies after eight years of Bush. He was running to change politics. Instead, from day one, he completely embraced the old politics.
Then there’s the individual mandate, he used that issue to beat Hillary Clinton, then flipped pretty quickly.
Well, okay, I guess. But politicians always say they’re going to change things, because people are always unhappy with the way their government works. Imagine a politician standing up to say, “Eh, things seem okay now. I’m not going to change anything, just leave everything the way it is. There’s really no reason to vote for me at all.” Does anyone really pay attention to the whole “change Washington” crap?!
Lots of candidates do it, but only Obama portrayed himself as a historically unique candidate, one who would be more straightforward, practical, transparent, and honest. I remember the Clinton “change” campaign well, but Clinton never claimed to be a different kind of politician. HJe lived and breathed politics, Obama claimed to be above that sort of thing.
He doesn’t have any lobbyists working in his administration as promised, correct?
No, that one was broken a long time ago. Link. It’s become quite the sport in Washington for some people to de-register as a lobbyist and instead be a general consultant, so that they do not have the scarlet “L” emblazoned on them. (De-registering as a lobbyist means that someone can’t engage in certain activities, it isn’t like someone can go about doing lobbyists work while having their fingers crossed or something.)
Don’t forget that he also promised to get the whole digital cable switch sorted for us, and he did it, promise definitely kept. Made it his first priority and everything.
On the lobbyist thing, that should have been predictable. Obama’s a lawyer and lawyers think that if they fulfill the letter of an agreement, even if they positively maul the spirit of it, that’s just dandy. I always enjoy watching politicians find ways around the law and the Constitution, as if it’s an obstacle to be gotten around, rather than rules to be followed.
Here’s Politifact’s list of President Obama’s campaign promises, as well as how they rate them.
That site shows how tough it is to measure such a thing. On a couple, it seems they were being too easy on him, but on a couple more it looked like they were being too hard.
And it doesn’t list the most important promise, IMO, which was non-specific: that he was as different kind of politician, a unique, once in a lifetime candidate who was different from all those other candidates.
If there’s one thing that no one should be able to dispute, it’s that in fact he’s just been more of the same. There is nothing substantially different about how Obama does politics vs. how Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Ford, Nixon, or any other President did. He’s no more likely to be a straight-talker, no less likely to dodge questions, etc.
I don’t think he ever actually said that. That was the myth that developed around him, but it wasn’t his thing. It was what people put on him.
He fed it though. His response to every McCain attack was, “This kind of politics is just more of the same. People want change.”
This was mostly in response to negativity from the McCain campaign. Which is really funny given the kind of campaign Obama is running now.
One moment I found particularly galling was when McCain asked Obama a question about one of his promises during a public meeting between the President and Congressional Republicans.
These negotiations will be on C-SPAN, and so the public will be part of the conversation and will see the decisions that are being made.” January 20, 2008, and seven other times.
when John McCain asked about it during the health-care summit February 26, Obama dismissed the issue by declaring, “the campaign is over, John.”
I can’t think of any way to interpret that statement other than, “I said what i had to say to get elected. I really am just the same, I just needed to fool people into thinking I was different.”
Whenever I see stuff like that (and I’ve been seeing the quote on rightie sites for a few days), they always make me suspicious.
According to this ABC Fact Check, that quote was about TARP.
Here’s the Lauer interview transcript: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/28975726/ns/today-today_people/t/obama-were-suffering-massive-hangover/# and it’s true that all the preceding questions were about TARP.
This kind of right-wing cherry picking is exactly the kind of dishonest crap that makes me distrust Repubicans/conservatives. How long did someone have to search to find Obama looking like he is saying he will fix the economy in 3 years or be a one-termer. He’s a pretty sensible guy and I didn’t think he would make a blanket statement like that.
Turns out, he didn’t.
And, truly, these kinds of misrepresentation of the truth are what prevent me from voting Republican. So, keep it up, guys, if you want to continue to alienate people. It’s working!
Reading it myself in context, it is not at all clear to me that he is only talking about TARP. He refers to “pain out there”. That’s not a reference to banks, that’s a reference to the overall economic situation.
You could be right, but there’s no reason to assume dishonesty where genuine differences of opinion about what he meant are possible.
And in any case, that sounds less like a promise than an observation. He probably is going to be a one term President, unless he can take the focus off his record, something which incumbents rarely succeed in doing.
I’m biased towards Obama, but looking at that scorecard is pretty impressive reading on the whole.
Up to 85% of his promises he has made real and genuine effort to keep (depending on how you think) seems to be a pretty good record for me.
And looking in from outside the US - after 8 years of Bush’s “with us or against us” he does feel like a different sort of politician (but of course part of that is my own rose coloured glasses)
I’ll acknowledge that most of his policy promises have been kept or he’s tried to keep them. Just one really big whopper that I can tell, the individual mandate. Oh, NAFTA as well, but we knew that one was inoperable when he sent Austen Goolsbee to assure the Canadians that his anti-NAFTA rhetoric was just “campaign talk.”
But is his record on policy promises better than average? Seems to me that Clinton actually kept a much higher percentage, and Bush a higher percentage still, since he made fewer and they were easy to keep. Much like Obama, Bush broke the non-specific promises, like “I want a humble foreign policy.” Which to many of us, was far more consequential than whether or not he kept his promise to change the depreciation allowance.
Thing is about his “change” campaign: I don’t think anyone CAN be different. It’s a promise made before he sat in the Big Chair and learned how the machine operates. Change is great, but sometimes can’t be done.
each President has their own style, some less politics oriented than others. What made Obama’s change rhetoric so galling is that he’s a lot more political and cynical than most Presidents.
I think the problem with Obama is that he’s been part of the Illinois establishment ever since he was a pretty young guy. I don’t think he knows how to be any different. Most Presidents came from someplace else, either smaller states where things are done a little differently, or had careers other than politics for most of their lives. To him, he probably is a big change from what you’d expect from a Chicago politician.
Hm. When he was running in 2008, the main charge against him was that he was too inexperienced as a politician.