Progressives pointing out when Pres. Obama breaks his campaign promises . . .

[Krashkopf]

is NOT being freeperish, as some DUers have claimed, and it is NOT throwing a temper tantrum as some in the MSN have tried to characterize it.

its simply pointing out the TRUTH.

For example, Candidate Obama courted progressives during the campaign with his talk about a robust public option.

Candidate Obama would NOT have won in Iowa without progressives.

Candidate Obama would NOT have captured the nomination without winnning in Iowa.

And, sadly, as soon as he got elected, President Obama he threw the progressives and the public option under the bus by supporting a health care bill that Candidate Obama - the man I voted for - would have OPPOSED.

Are we, progressives pissed off? You are damned right we are! And, you can be damned sure that we are not going to be quite about it!!!

Another DUer said, in a post that it is unbecoming a democrat to point it out when President Obama breaks his campaign promises.

I think it is UNBECOMING A DEMOCRAT to fall in, lock step, behind ANY President, even one WE ELECTED. Remember how we used to ridicule the Republicans for doing JUST THAT!?

[MercutioATC]

1. Hear, Hear!

Some of those who mock "dittoheads" on the right are the most vocal "don't criticize Obama" people here.

[Richardo]

2. Keep an eye on the St Petersburg Times Campaign Promise Scorecard

A nice objective ledger - I hope they compile one for every President from now on.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/

[leftofcool]

3. Correct! Dissent is a right, not an option

[Blue State Blues]

16. This brand of dissent is not merely a right, it is a responsibility. n/t

[lamp_shade]

4. Feeling wounded this morning are ya?

[bigwillq]

5. Good post.

:thumbsup:

[zulchzulu]

6. Do you have the link where Obama's presidential term is over already?

Usually you don't rate a President's broken campaign promises until the term is over. Last I checked, it's been less than a year since Obama has been President.

You're the smart guy who has figured out his term is already over. Please provide the proof.


:crazy:

[virtualobserver]

7. Obama isn't a dictator, he is an elected official.

In campaigns you present the things that you would like to achieve, but ultimately only compromises get through Congress.
Obama knew the limitations that he faced early on.

Reality: multiple Dem. Senators would have joined a filibuster. Ramming a version of this through using reconciliation would have poisoned the political waters.

[Krashkopf]

8. I'd AGREE with you IF Obama had Fought for the Public Option . . .

and lost.

I am pissed off that he never fought for it.

He could have made a robust public option a "nonnegotiable" item, and told Congress that HE would veto any bill that didn't have it.

Do you REALLY think that the blue dogs would have "bucked" a popular democratic president who had just swept then into majorities in both houses? I don't think so.

Do you REALLY think that Joe Liebermann would have filibustered if he KNEW that he would lose his chairmanship if he did? Again, I don't think so.

As for "poisoning the political waters" can they really be poisoned any more than they already are?

[virtualobserver]

11. when you had multiple Senators publicly announcing for months that they would kill....

any bill that contained certain elements, they were not leaving themselves any room to change. Obama was not going to spend energy fighting unwinnable battles.

[uponit7771]

30. Link and quote Obama "never fighting" for the public option....thx

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

9. What makes said behavior freeperish is that they ignore the kept promises.

And there are 8 times as many kept promises as there are broken ones. The count is 75 to 9, according to politifact.com. And yet that means Obama = Bush to many posters.

So you'll forgive me for finding your post disingenuous. It is the very essence of freeperism to ignore all of the achievements to focus on a few disappointments.

[virtualobserver]

13. I think that using the term "disingenuous" goes too far.

This was a GREAT disappointment to many people.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

14. I think that using the term "many" goes too far. (nt)

[Krashkopf]

18. I am not ignoring ANY of the achievements . . .

and I am not going to ignore ANY of the "disappointments", either.

[davidpdx]

24. Personally I think the Obama=Bush meme

Is where I draw the line. I have no problem with differing opinions, but that is just plain insane.

[treestar]

42. True, and there is no way any President can keep all promises

Or one should not interpret "promises" as anything more than to use executive power in favor of it.

[liberalmuse]

10. I remember his health care plan...

it did not include a public option.

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[girl gone mad]

17. When all of the compromises are in one direction..

it ceases to be compromise and just becomes failure.

[THUNDER HANDS]

15. throwing the bill away and starting again from scratch would have made any bill worse, not better

look at how embolded Lieberman, Nelson, et all are now. You'd be lucky to get half the good stuff that's in this bill back in. Or rather, you'd be lucky to have half the bad stuff that's not in the bill be left out of it.

Obama got what he could. And unless this is your first rodeo, you really shouldn't hold a politician to his or her promises 100%.

[Vidar]

19. K&R.

[Baltoman991]

20. Honestly, did

anyone who slams Obama really listen to the man?

It's quite obvious none of you did. He said many times that things wouldn't get fixed in his first year, his second year and in most cases, not even during his first term. To continue the bullshit of broken promises is pure crap. This is a four year, ongoing process. Because everything you want isn't done right now doesn't make a promise broken.

I'll say again, our side is becoming as pathetic as the other side with their want it all now attitude. If after 4 years, or 8 if he's re-elected, he doesn't fulfill all his promises, then you can tell us all how many he broke. Until then, you do some freeperish with the inane crap about said broken promises.

[shadesofgray]

21. K&R. I'll never believe another word he says and that's HIS fault, not mine.

Instead of keeping his promises, he denigrates those of us who dare to point out that he went back on his word.

I guess he thinks he doesn't need us in 2012. How wrong he is.

[boppers]

22. Straw men are fun to knock down.

That doesn't make them real.

[Blasphemer]

23. Indeed... all elected official need to be held accountable... nt

[ima_sinnic]

25. he skillfully manipulated people's expectations both by overt promises and more subtle "innuendoes"

I now find him untrustworthy. He seems to kiss republican and corporate CEO ass quite willingly, and has wasted a great deal of his "political capital" on the asinine and self-defeating objective of "bipartisanship."

"Bipartisanship" can be used either to say, okay, we tried to work with you and you didn't want to play, so now we're going to do it my way (or Democrats' way), as he presents his bare minimum plan and demands, OR to say well, we tried to work with and you didn't want to play, so how low do I have to keep dropping my vision and my expectations to give you everything you want?

He has unfailingly chosen the latter course, to dilute expectations down to a mediocre level--never really low enough to satisfy his own blue dogs or the republicans in any case--and for that I have lost enormous respect for him. He never sets a bar below which he won't pass, which indicates he has no firm principles that he'll stand on. Risk is too risky it appears.

[tsuki]

26. I agree with you. He looks weak, and weakness is a problem for

the Democrats.

Boosting troop levels in Afghanistan did not make him look strong. He just caved to the MIC, just like he caved to the insurance cartel.

All the so-called protections of the senate bill can be rolled back and called "deregulation". It will happen. The insurance cartel will lie low for a couple of years, then get a Republicon in. And they will be rolled back without 60 votes.

[ima_sinnic]

27. this "health care reform bill" is a bankrupting disaster in the making

I just bought a house I absolutely love this summer, finally, late in life, and I think I'd kill myself before having to give that up to pay my "health insurance." The fact that Obama did not make a viable, "robust" public option a minimum condition for signing a bill just indicates his lack of principles and courage.

[tsuki]

40. Gov. Lawton Chiles gave us co-ops and rules, and it worked until

Jeb Bush and Bill Nelson rolled back the reforms claiming they were hurting "free enterprise". I look for everything to disappear in a couple of years, except the mandate just like it did in Florida.

[jonnyblitz]

28. exactly. nt

[uponit7771]

31. innuendoes = I didn't pay attention

[ima_sinnic]

37. oh, aren't you clever

no, it means he's like a used-car salesman who knows how to say what people want to hear without actually saying much of anything.

sorry, defenses of triangulation and bullshit are falling on deaf ears around here. but keep trying, if it makes you happy to sell democratic reaming (as opposed to republican reaming); there IS a big profit in that, I hear.

[uponit7771]

29. Please link and quote Obama saying the Public Option was the ONLY way he'd support price controls

[Peacetrain]

32. Bull Hockey

[ClarkUSA]

33. Politifact says of the "mentions of the public option in Obama's speeches... you'll find very few."

... the public option was not a very prominent part of Obama's platform... he didn't discuss it very much during the campaign. That's true for both the general election and the Democratic primary.

If you look for mentions of the public option in Obama's speeches or comments to voters, you'll find very few. In fact, Obama gave a major address in Iowa on May 29, 2007, outlining his health care plan in considerable detail. There's not one mention of the public option in his speech.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/23/barack-obama/public-option-obama-platform/

Anyone can slice a few cherrypicked film clips together to give an erroneous impression, but Politifact is an unbiased source.

As far as I recall, and I worked for the campaign for most of last year, Candidate Obama campaigned on everyone having the same insurance option that he and congress have and that's just what happened. Now I'll let others split hairs while I enjoy reading the following article.

Why the health care bill is the greatest social achievement of our time.
Jonathan Chait, Senior Editor of The New Republic
December 24, 2009 | 12:00 am

The first thing reform does is make insurance affordable for people who currently can’t buy it. Why can’t people afford insurance now? Well, either they don’t get it through work and can’t afford a regular insurance plan (say, a cashier at Wal Mart who doesn’t get insurance through her job) or they have a preexisting condition which means no insurer will sell them a regular insurance plan (say, a diabetic who can’t get insurance on the individual market.) Or sometimes both (a diabetic Wal Mart cashier, perhaps.)

Health reform solves the affordability problem by subsidizing insurance coverage, or expanding Medicaid, for low- and moderate-income families. And it solves the pre-existing condition problem by setting up a marketplace, called an exchange, where insurers must sell policies to anybody, at one price, and cover all basic services. In order to prevent people from going uninsured until they get sick, it also requires everybody to purchase insurance, except in limited hardship cases...

Reality lies in between the two mutually exclusive caricatures. First of all, the insurance industry has taken a decidedly mixed stance on health care reform... Second of all, most of us normally accept private profit accompanying public services. Liberals don’t call programs to reduce class size a “teacher’s union bailout.” Nor do liberals call Pentagon increases a “defense contractor’s bailout.” Insurers may be getting a lot of new customers, but that comes with the trade-off of a lot of unwanted regulation. There is more at work in the progressive revolt than an irrational attachment to the public plan or an executive distrust of private industry. The bizarre convergence of left-wing and right-wing paranoia echoes the forces that brought down the moderate consensus of the postwar era.

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/just-noise

As someone who worked for the campaign in Iowa, I assure you that Iowans voted for him for many reasons totally unrelated to the public option. In fact, I don't recall him ever mentioning it in any of his campaign speeches there prior to his decisive primary win.

[uponit7771]

34. Facts!?!!? We don't need no damn facts!!!

[ClarkUSA]

35. lol

Happy Holidays to you, uponit7771.

:toast:

[dkf]

36. I'm not sure if he was for the public option but I'm DAMNED sure he campaigned against mandates.

I never believed in mandates and forcing people to expand corporate profits is criminal to me. My disgust knows no bounds.

[HughMoran]

39. "My disgust knows no bounds."

It's the lack of bounds that's blindingly clear. BTW, guaranteed coverage, no pre-existing condition & no lifetime limits does not work without a mandate. He was convinced based on the logic presented to him that you had to have mandates for the system to work.

[HughMoran]

38. I'll PM you a dozen names and you can search what they post

Then tell me that there aren't certain people that take advantage of the defense you're offering to simply bash someone they never supported and never will. If a poster shows no balance due to a pre-existing bias - you can be damned sure that people will call them out on it. Do you have a problem with that?

[Bluenorthwest]

41. The President has pre existing bias against GLBT people

which he claims is due to his religion. Well, that religion has extremely extensive and detailed teachings about honest, direct speech. The parsing of words is most decidedly not allowed. Vague speech intended to or even allowing for the creation of confusion is absolutely forbidden. If a listener misunderstands one's words, that fault lies in the words, and in the speaker, who is compelled to seek utter clarity and precision in speech.
The hypocrisy is beyond measure.