Monitoring the Campaign Promises of President Obama

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While on the campaign trail Presidential candidate Obama made over 500 promises.  Now that he’s President Obama and has had just over a month in office let’s take a look at some of the things he’s done (or not done as the case may be).

According to the Obameter by PolitiFact Obama made 510 promises over the course of his campaign.  As of March 1st the tally stands at: 

• 16 Promises Kept
• 6 Compromises
• 2 Promises Broken
• 1 Stalled
• 27 In The Works
• 458 No Action

In this post I’ll be looking at the first 4 of these points and later in the week I’ll speak to the last two.

Promises Kept

In case you’re sporadic in your news reading like I am you might have missed some of the things that President Obama has done in the past 40 days.  Things like supporting an increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and promoting the removal of vegetation that fuels wildfires.  Living in the land of wildfires this one is especially important to me!

There are of course the more headline creating promises like directing an end to the war in Iraq (if that will happen as promised remains to be seen) and expanding children’s eligibility for insurance through SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Fund).

Compromises

Most of Obama’s compromises so far have had to do with tax credits for various segments of the population.  And the main reason that these are compromises is because many of his credits would have just cost the government too much money.  In the face of the huge economic recovery bill that was just passed, these things had to be pared down.

One of the compromises that bothers me however, is that Obama promised that,

“No political appointees in an Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration.”

Yet Obama has since introduced a waiver system whereby if a person he wishes to nominate does not meet the above requirements he can have conditions placed upon him and still get the position.  This doesn’t seem like a healthy way to find unbiased individuals to fill government positions!

Promises Broken

Of the two promises that fall in this category I think one was a mis-guided idea and the other could have and should have been kept.  The first was to give companies a $3,000 tax credit for creating new jobs, a bureaucratic paperwork nightmare that’s just ripe for fraud.  

The second was a promise to “allow 5 days of public comment before signing any bills”.  He’s already broken this one on at least 2 bills and I’m having a hard time finding a section on the whitehouse.gov site that would have bills for comment.  I did find a White House Blog that looks promising and you can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on that!

Promises Stalled

The promise here has to do with early withdrawal from retirement accounts.  Being that I’m only 29 and don’t even have a retirement account I don’t understand this entirely.  The main idea was that Obama promised penalty free withdrawal due to the economic downturn, but so far there has been no legislation introduced that would allow this.  The current rules allow for early withdrawal with a penalty and the money is taxed at current rates.  The taxes would still apply under the “promise”, but the penalty would have been withdrawn.

I hope you find this as interesting as I do and help me keep an eye on our new government!  It’s our right and responsibility!

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