.
In a further sign of the deterioration of relations between
the Obama Administration and Israel, the President took the
unusual step of blasting the Israeli Prime Minister in news conferences for
statements the PM made on the eve of the Israeli elections.
The stunning and decisive victory by Netanyahu seemed to
fuel the attacks by Obama who is still outraged that the PM addressed the
United States Congress without the approval of the president.
Obama called the promises by Netanyahu "cynical"
and 19 times in one news conference, said they would lead to a reassessment by
the United States of our
relationship with Israel.
Now something is very wrong with the righteous attack by
Obama. This is the same Obama, who made
508 promises in his own 2008 campaign for president and only managed to fulfill
38% of them, and then added more in 2012 he is yet to fulfill.
Therefore, Obama can fail to deliver 62% of the time himself
but thinks an election campaign in another country should be free of any
campaign promises, and only deal in campaign facts.
Get real Mr. President, it seems all politicians are foot
loose and fancy free when it comes to delivering campaign promises.
We do not need to encourage the terrorist world by
alienating our only true friend in the Middle East
over nonsense such as campaign promises.
For those of you suffering from memory loss, the following
are two articles by left-leaning news outlets detailing the failure of Obama to
deliver on his own campaign promises.
Do Promises Matter Anymore? Countdown
Day 36
Posted: 10/01/2012 7:55 pm EDT
Updated: 12/01/2012 5:12 am EST
Howard Fineman, Editorial
director, Huffington Post Media Group
WASHINGTON -- In the 2008
presidential campaign, Barack Obama was full of promise -- 508 of them to be
precise. He was the harbinger of hope in the last dark months of the George W.
Bush years.
But
with just six weeks to go until Election Day 2012, President Obama has made few
new promises and is not repeating many of the original ones. By PolitiFact's accounting,
he has delivered on 38 percent of them -- a lousy shooting percentage in the
NBA.
Instead,
Obama is selling himself based on what he isn't: Mitt Romney. And rather than
trying to convince voters that great days surely lie ahead -- a tough sell to a
skeptical electorate -- he often offers a litany of reduced expectations, grim
economic realism and rueful lamentations about the gridlock in Washington that
he, in his innocence, did not expect. His slogan, "Forward," can
sound less like an invitation to a glorious Elysium and more like a military
command on a bloody battlefield.
The
candidate who won on the high-octane power of optimism is now running on the
cautious notion that the future ain't what it used to be.
The
message, rarely overtly expressed, is that we are facing a tough grind (in
terms of tax increases, slow job growth and entitlement cutbacks), and it's
better to have a compassionate, user-friendly communitarian in the Oval Office
than a wealthy, spreadsheet-and-shredder CEO who was born with a silver foot in
his mouth.
The
president now leads in this war of attrition and lowered sights.
Despite
what the polls say, though, it is not clear the Obama strategy will hold up all
the way to Election Day. There are three inherent risks: Voters prefer
campaigns of dreams to those of realism. A chance, admittedly slight, remains
that Romney will find his voice and a message at the last minute. And voters
may yet choose to take one last look at the details of the president's record.
What
they will find is that the Obama that is often isn't the Obama that wanted to
be. This is not an observation confined to the Rush Limbaugh right; many on the
progressive left have said the same thing.
That's
where the past promises come in -- and the question of whether they mean much
in our promiscuously promissory age.
Only
once in any direct and sharp way has the president been confronted with tough
questions about a failed promise. When Univision news anchors asked
him why he had not won comprehensive immigration reform, or even
pushed for it, Obama seemed both surprised and confused that he had been
pressed on such an obvious point. The answer he gave -- that the pressures in
Congress were just too daunting -- was less than convincing.
The
president has
kept promises No. 1 and No. 2: He calmly led the fight to bring the United
States back from the brink of economic catastrophe (including a workable
bailout of the auto industry), and he got a version of a national health care
system passed and, as it turned out, sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But he
hasn't come close to reducing unemployment to the levels his aides envisioned
and predicted, poverty is at an all-time high, and the annual deficit has
certainly not been cut in half.
Here's
a short list of other, more specific promises compiled by PolitiFact:
•
Establish a mortgage foreclosure prevention fund. (Deemed a "colossal
failure" by a special inspector general.)
•
Close the Guantanamo
Bay detention camp.
(Punted.)
•
Create a cap-and-trade system with interim goals to reduce global warming.
(Punted.)
• Sign
the Employee Free Choice Act, making it easier to unionize. (Couldn't get a
must-pass bill through a Democratic Congress.)
•
Allow importation of prescription drugs. (Bargained away to big pharma.)
• Sign
the Freedom of Choice Act, guaranteeing abortion rights against state
legislative encroachments. (Never pushed it.)
•
Include a "public option" in the health care plan. (Punted.)
•
Bring in the dawn of a new bipartisan era. (Not.)
To
that list, I would add one more failure: Public schools in general are not
noticeably improving the education of students.
Perhaps
lists such as these don't matter anymore. After all, most focus on expansions
of federal power that the president was not able to achieve -- failures that
Romney has no standing to criticize, given his conversion to Tea Party
libertarianism.
It is true that
Republicans have opposed the president at every turn, even though their
truculence also exposed Obama's lack of deal-making skills.
As for
Romney, he isn't making many specific promises, and the ones he is making tend
to be of the negative variety: abolishing Obamacare, abolishing the Dodd-Frank
bank regulation law, cutting tax rates, abolishing unspecified tax loopholes.
His "promise" to "create 12 million jobs" is a laughable
non-event, since that is the number of jobs the economy is predicted to produce
over the next four years regardless of who is president.
But
maybe voters, as cynical as they are these days, have just given up on
expecting elected leaders to deliver on their promises. If that is so, how will
voters decide whether a president deserves reelection -- or a challenger
deserves to replace him?
It's
not a promising development.
What Obama Promises To Do Next
Posted: 11/07/2012 1:44 pm EST
Updated: 11/07/2012 4:11 pm
EST
WASHINGTON -- Now
President Barack Obama has some promises to keep.
His
2012 campaign wasn't nearly as full of measurable commitments as his first one
in 2008, but there were still plenty -- some of which are due in a matter of
weeks, not months or years.
The
most immediate deliverable -- and the one for which he has the clearest mandate
-- is a tax hike for the rich.
Obama
can deliver that fairly easily because the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of
the year. Without doing anything, he can restore the top marginal tax rate to
39.6 percent, up from 35 percent, restore the estate tax, and raise the capital
gains tax cap from 15 percent to 20 percent.
But in
that process, Obama also has repeatedly vowed to strike what is often referred
to as a "grand bargain" -- a bipartisan deal that would link tax
increases for the rich to budget cuts, possibly involving Social Security, in
order to start along the path to long-term deficit reduction.
In his
victory speech early
Wednesday morning, Obama restated his biggest promises. "In the coming
weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders
of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together: reducing our
deficit; reforming our tax code; fixing our immigration system; freeing
ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do."
But
there's no way for Obama to fulfill any of those major promises unless he gets
House Republicans to go along. So he has essentially promised to deliver
Republicans, starting very soon.
Of course, he promised to do that in 2008,
too.
Post
inauguration, Obama's first big deliverable is comprehensive immigration reform
providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. In September,
Obama told a Miami audience that
his inaction on immigration was the "biggest failure" of his first
term. In October, he told the Des Moines Register,
he is confident he can deliver because he has new leverage.
"Should
I win a second term, a big reason I will win a second term is because the
Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the
fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community,"
he said. But his assumption -- that the GOP will realize it can't afford to
keep its hard line position on immigration any longer -- is unproven.
Obama
can keep some of his promises even with an obstructionist GOP if he's willing
to take bold, unilateral steps that he
shrank from in his first term. For instance, Obama has talked about
addressing the continued housing crisis; the obvious next step would be to
allow principal reductions for troubled borrowers whose mortgages are owned by
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama is expected to start soon by firing acting
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Ed DeMarco.
Obama
has promised to reduce air pollution and other environmental hazards, and a more muscular approach
to agency rule-making could go a long way in that direction.
But if
second-term Obama is focused on establishing a historic legacy, then he's going
to have to take on the issue of climate change -- going far beyond the innovation agenda of
his first term, and establishing some a carbon tax or emissions caps.
Republican
presidential nominee Mitt Romney mocked Obama for having "promised to
begin to slow the rise of the oceans” in 2008. Environmentalists, by contrast,
are hoping the president will now act on that promise.
The path to such an agreement is far from clear, however.
Similarly,
it's hard to see how Obama can deliver on his most frequent campaign promises,
which related to the middle class and job creation. Underlying those promises
is his vow to invest in education, research, but most of all infrastructure --
and he can't do that without Congress.
In the
same town hall where he discussed his failure to achieve immigration reform,
Obama said "the most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t
change Washington
from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.” He seemed to be
suggesting that the American public help him pressure Congress.
But
it's not just Congress. Progressive activists have learned the hard way
that Obama himself is best at keeping his own promises when he is held to them
by organized and mobilized grassroots campaigns.
Here
are some of the major promises made by the Obama 2012 campaign in ads, the
Democratic Party platform, Obama's major speeches, debates, and other sources.
Middle class/Taxes
·
Return to Clinton-era tax
rates for families earning above $250,000.
·
Give middle-class families and
folks trying to get into the middle class some relief.
·
98 percent of families will
not see a tax increase.
Job
creation/Business/Manufacturing
·
Close loopholes that allow
companies to deduct expenses when they export jobs.
·
Tax breaks for companies that
are investing in the United
States.
·
97 percent of small businesses
will not see a tax increase.
·
Reduce corporate tax rate to
25 percent, while eliminating many deductions.
·
Create a million new
manufacturing jobs in the next four years.
·
Help big factories and small
businesses double their exports.
·
Invest in advanced
manufacturing.
Energy/Gas/Environment
·
By the middle of the next
decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas.
·
Open more land for oil-and-gas
exploration.
·
Cut oil imports in half by
2020.
·
Develop new sources of energy
in America.
·
Reduce carbon pollution.
Education
·
Hire 100,000 new math and
science teachers.
·
Create 2 million more slots in
our community colleges so people can get job training.
·
Cut tuition increases in half
over 10 years.
Health care
·
When Obamacare is fully
implemented, costs will go down.
·
Lower Medicare health care
costs.
·
Improve benefits, cut payments
to hospitals and other providers by $700 billion.
Deficit
·
Put U.S. on path to cut deficits by $4
trillion over 10 years.
Immigration
·
Pass comprehensive immigration
reform.
·
Give young people a path to
citizenship.
Foreign policy
·
Transition out of Afghanistan by
end of 2014.
·
Iran will
not get a nuclear weapon.
Gun control
·
Keep guns out of the hands of
criminals and those who are mentally ill.
·
Increase enforcement of
current laws.
·
Reintroduce assault weapons
ban.
.
