Can Obama keep up with all his promises?
Posted on November 12, 2008 in I'm Conservative - Deal With It by DM
Well let’s see, in his first week as President-Elect, Barack Obama has already learned a few critical lessons:
- MoveOn.org probably expects a significant return on their investment (pdf download)
- Involuntary servitude is so 150 years ago
- It isn’t really “change” when your transition team is made up entirely of big donors and Clintonistas
In the days after the election, I began to get a sense of just how beholden Obama would be to the “special interests” (that’s what happens when you choose private campaign funding), by reading through the congratulatory news releases that were issued by various professional associations across the country. These releases (and there were dozens of them) generally started out with a “(Name of group) congratulates President-Elect Obama…” statement, followed by a “We are eager to work with him” statement. Those to whom he had promised something specific were more than happy to reiterate exactly what they had been told by the candidate:
For example, the American Nurse’s Association says:
“Barack Obama has promised to work toward improving working conditions for nurses, including limiting mandatory overtime, improving nurse-to-patient ratios, providing additional support to training and incentive programs, and continuing to recognize and support nurses’ right to organize. In addition, Obama supports reauthorization of Title VIII training programs with greater financial incentives for students and nurse faculty, including scholarships and loan repayment.”
Meanwhile, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has some expectations too:
“Over the course of his campaign, President-elect Obama has focused his education reform efforts around strengthening accountability and choice in public education, especially through the expansion of high-quality public charter schools… His bold proposal to double federal funding for public charter schools signals his strong commitment to making high quality public school options available to families who need them most.”
Finally, we have Americans United for Life, a group which notes that Obama talked centrist when he was around them, but then -
“… he promised Planned Parenthood that his first act as President will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act… (which) stands in contradiction to the common ground, common sense abortion regulations that the majority of Americans support and that this radical legislation would eliminate.”
Now, all of this is not just to say that Obama made a lot of promises - certainly, every politician does that. The point is, there’s simply no way he’s going to be able to make all these people happy, and a whole lot of folks are going to end up disillusioned by “Change.”
This litany of news releases also serves to help us get to know Obama, a responsibility which the mainstream media shamefully abdicated early on in the election cycle in favor of outright fanaticism and hero-worship. More on this in the near future.
For now – happy Week One, Mr. President-Elect, I hope someone on your team is keeping track of all this stuff, because you know MoveOn’s not gonna forget 88 million dollars.
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