Writing in the always fabulous London Review of Books, David Bromwich has a very interesting argument on why Barack Obama has been something of a disappointment. Though Bromwich’s political commitments are fairly well known – at least to readers of HuffPo – his critique isn’t particularly ideological. Rather, Bromwich, a Professor of Literature at Yale, encapsulates Obama’s political failings rather more astutely than a lot of professional observers of political strategy. The whole argument is worth reading, but the kernel of it is the observation that Obama consistently underestimates the forces ranged against him, and that he becomes mired again and again in role confusion – inspirer-in-chief tends to trump politician in a predictable pattern.
It may be that this is actually inherent in the American system of government – it’s a very difficult balancing act for one figure to be simultaneously symbolic head of the nation and executive of the political state. It’s pretty clear, too, how the particularity of Obama’s identity can be mobilised by the Fox News noise machine to disrupt the first identification, leading the President to spend far too much time rising above politics rather than practising it. It’s always going to be more difficult for a president of the centre-left to straddle this divide, but as Bromwich suggests, it’s rather puzzling that a man as intelligent as Obama goes on making the same mistake again and again.
Update: In the New York review of Books, Michael Tomasky writes on the right wing street protests and the noise machine, and Elizabeth Drew examines Obama’s performance in office through the prism of the healthcare debate:
In fact, the question has arisen of whether Barack Obama’s particular—one might say idiosyncratic—governing style is right for these times.
Maybe Obama’s just not that smart.
Americans tend to either valorise or demonise their presidents, depending on their own particular affiliations – maybe it’s a result of the nation’s history and the way the political system is set up over there. If ‘The West Wing’ is any guide, Americans are rather too willing to believe in the image of the benign, uber-intelligent president.
There are many ways to see the failings of the U.S.A. President.One of them would simply be to checkout wether all the Tertiary Education facilities as Teaching staff students actually ever did hold him in high regard.
I guess it’s trite to talk about the excessively high expectations of Obama leading up to and immediately after his election and inauguration, indeed, it seems like Bromwich’s analysis starts at a point beyond that. If we judge Obama on simply what he’s said he’d do, as opposed to what was hoped of him, how does he measure up?
It’s all very well for us to have all cheered that someone would occupy the White House who was the antithesis to Bush, and that there’d actually be more than a dead hand on the steering wheel. But the standards set by the Bush presidency established a phenomenally low bar. It’s not enough for Obama to be better than Bush, and if it was he could have comfortably resigned immediately after taking the pledge of office.
Yet Bromwich’s critique does go too far in some respects. If Obama is presuming that he’s been elected for a four year term, and has no right to presume a second, then what’s wrong with demurring from prosecuting a campaign against the excesses of the former regime? How would that help to defuse the Limbaugh claim, quoted in the article, that the President has effectively declared war on 50% of Americans over healthcare?
Bromwich argues that Obama’s flawed appreciation of his domestic enemies includes some naivety that majoritarian decisions leave people behind, and that he appears to present himself as not a leader of a political party. Well, after a bitter, trench warfare battle within his own party to gain endorsement, this would appear an unfair claim. If it takes time to heal the rifts with those who are left behind, surely Obama knows this to be the case because, not in spite, of his affiliation with the Democratic Party.
It’s been four months since the Cairo speech and Obama hasn’t delivered significant progress on the Israel-Palestinian dispute? Only four months? Give me a break.
On some of the more general arguments, though, I agree with him. I too wondered how long Obama was going to let the healthcare nonsense go on before interceding. I thought it was too long, and I’ve only seen one appearance on Letterman subsequently that has furthered his arguments.
There’s a problem if, as Bromwich suggests, the President believes that in the long run he will be shown to have been a man who held the long view. The problem is that this can still be true if he fails to implement any of those views.
About this far into Bill Clinton’s first term things were looking pretty dire for him as well. Time magazine called him ‘the incredible shrinking President’. I know it is nearly a year but this is really still very early to be writing Obama off in such absolute terms. I know this isn’t the happiest comparison, but this far into GW bush’s presidency 11 Sept had just occurred – and who could tell what was going to happen?
OTOH – possibly Team Obama believe their 2008 election victory was a unique result for their man – when really the shocking result would have been if a Democrat had failed to beat a Republican last year. From the top of the pile it’s easy to believe it’s all about you.
No surprises in this. An ideological opposition to Obama is not required, rather all one needs is a brain, to see that he isn’t up to the job. He never was.
There is not one aspect of his background that indicates he has what it takes to be president.
Yet he is so clearly superior in every respect to his predecessor.
Actually, despite my own serious reservation about the wisdom of the course Obama is following, I do have to acknowledge that he has been handed perhaps the most devastating hospital pass in US history, utterly putting in the shade the pass Jimmy Carter got from Gerald Ford.
Think of it … the expectations
Domestic: Health care, crashed economy, failing infrastructure, gay rights, state of the Supreme Court;
International: Climate Change; the DPRK, Iran and NNPT; the Israel-Palestine; coup in Honduras; the GFC; rise of China; two major wars. the progress of Pakistan to failed statedom … and he has taken on nuclear de-escalation; those missiles of Bush’s in Eastern Europe
Success in any of these areas would be a major achievement and yet, all of them will likely take two terms. If he succeeds in two or three, he will be hailed a genius, and if he fails, it won’t be because he was a dummy. Tough gig.
Ask yourself — what other person on either side who might conceivably have won would stand better or even as well in any of these areas now? Nobody I can think of.
What would that doddering old half-wit McCain have been doing about now with Sarah “I can see russia from my kitchen” Palin to assist? Would the stand-off over Eastern Europe have been resolved by now? Would the other powers be lining aup to strong-arm Iran over NNPT? Would the Copenhagen talks have even served any conceivable purpose? Would unemployment in the US be lower? Would health care be on the way to being fixed up? How would US standing have been? Fox would be running the country.
How would Huckabee or Hillary “white working class” Clinton have gone (shudder)?
There’s lots of room to criticise Obama.
Really, he shouldn’t have committed himself during the campaign to Afghanistan because he was always going to win, especially post-September 15, 2008. And he could have done the old “oh dear, I didn’t realise things were this bad” and high tailed it out of there while people were focusing on the GFC.
Plainly he should have made it clear that health care reform simply had to happen and set out a plan and insisted this was part of regularising the budget and doing justice to those uncovered.
He probably should have bailed out householders instead of bankers, and simply set up rival retail banking services with the cash.
But as someone said, the benchmark for Presidents is so low, especially now, that Obama only has to avoid being a total moron to improve.
I’ve found the only consistent way to measure Obama’s progress is Politifact: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
Given the scale of his program, and how he’s had to not only shift gears in entering office but replace the entire transmission, I expect there’ll continue to be major resistance. He still has majority support so most of articles like this seems to be articles writing copy for circulation purposes.
Politics is the art of the possible.
Any critique of Obama (or any other politician) is irrelevant until the critic describes what is possible.
Is there any political leader who hasn’t been a “disappointment”? What’s the measure for a politician to not be a disappointment?
I have to agree with Fran. The racist joke about America getting a black man to clean up the mess that was doing the rounds a while back has in its essence a kernel of truth. And as Katz says, its all about what is possible, what would things be like with someone else?
“Domestic: Health care, crashed economy, failing infrastructure, gay rights, state of the Supreme Court;
International: Climate Change; the DPRK, Iran and NNPT; the Israel-Palestine; coup in Honduras; the GFC; rise of China; two major wars. the progress of Pakistan to failed statedom … and he has taken on nuclear de-escalation; those missiles of Bush’s in Eastern Europe”
And G.W. Bush got to handle the fallour from 9/11.
I’m sure he was just ecstatic about that.
Seriously, stop making excuses for Obama. He’s terrible. He’s been in power for less than a year and already has made some of the biggest policy blunders in history (bailing out GM, capping executive salaries, lol.)
That’s a complete non sequitur, Katz.
I very much doubt you always follow this putative precept.
It’s quite possible, and wholly legitimate, to criticise a particular political strategy without necessary mapping out another one, though the alternative will normally be implicit in the critique (and it’s not far below the surface in Bromwich’s article). The extremely forceful attempt to undermine Obama’s legitimacy was entirely foreseeable, as was the consequence that restricting himself to pleas for unity and soaring rhetoric would enable his opponents to demonise the details of his proposals (in any case vague, because he allows others to formulate their substance if not their goals and parameters). Bromwich makes that case persuasively, and points out that Obama could have acted otherwise.
He was always on a hiding with the economy. However his health care problems are his own. He controls both houses of the US government, but cant pass his legislation? That indicates problems big enough for his own party to be wary of it.
What’s all the negatavism? He seems to me to be going great. He’s making solid progress with health care. The inherited financial mess was always going to take some time to come right. He has changed the tone of international discourse and results will follow. He is taking his time choosing a response to the inherited Afghanistan mess … and so he should. I fancy some of you have spent too much time listening to the right-wing noise machine. He’s not a Dubya. He won’t act intuitively. He won’t crash and bash his way to his goals with God-given certainty. He’s a smart, steady bloke who will attract good people around him and will take the time to get it right. No problemo.
Shorter SATP: While anybody with no brain at all can see that GWB was better.
It’s a little premature to write him off just yet, don’t you think? It looks like he may just have the numbers for his “public option” for health care.
I’ve found it interesting to follow the health care debate in the US. I’m a strong supporter of Medicare, of course, but listening to the arguments for a “public option” just confirms the wisdom of our Medicare system.
The main argument being used for a public option – and it’s a powerful one – is that it provides strong competition to private insurers, keeping costs down for the entire health sector. Australia already does this through Medicare and Medibank Private, not to mention regulating private insurance prices.
Everyone in Australia with private health insurance should be thankful that we have Medicare. Without it, health care costs generally would be much, much higher.
Medicare is also an extremely efficient system because it saves on admin costs and advertising and makes it easier to spot dodgy practices by doctors.
And like the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and other things that make this country a decent place to live, we have the ALP to thank for it.
Great.
So this David Bromwich writes an article blaming Obama for not doing the ‘courageous thing’ regarding Afghanistan and the West Bank & in standing up to the Right yet he also feels the need to throw in irrelevant anti-Obama memes.
Mark, why are we supposed to take this writer seriously on the American scene? Why not just post a link to an Ezra Klein or even a Matt Taibbi? That is, someone who knows enough about the subject not to unconsciously include nonsense.
Peter @14
As the old Persian aphorism goes …
He who knows not and knows not he knows not: he is a fool – shun him.
Why not just post a link to an Ezra Klein or even a Matt Taibbi?
Ask and ye shall receive. Taibbi’s article is superior to Bromwich’s – he blasts the whole Democratic party for timidity, rather than single out Obama for phony bipartisanship.
Mark, I not convinced by this article that Obama is a fail. An english professor from Yale might write a good article but from half a world away I’m more concerned that US as a whole seems be to be captive to gun-toting ultra right-wing miltary establishment who are fanning the flames of a racist anti-Obama campaign with a complete disregard for political conventions and with the simple objective of removing Obama from office, one way or another. American presidents have an unfortunate history of assassination by men with guns and I suspect there are substantive closed door real politics in play behind the public political displays of Obama and the democrats. In that sort of scenario, only some things are possible.
Indeed Fran, but I wonder if the Persians in the shunning had an equivalent to Oz pisstakes, the necessity and process thereof ?
So with his ‘known knowns’ bit, Rumsfeld was just trying to prove to the Persians he wasn’t a fool?
@19 – David_H, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you were right.
I should add that the title of the post should be taken with a grain of salt. I quite like the guy. But I don’t get the attitude – at all – that’s it’s illegitimate to be disappointed by the fact that he’s turned out to be a remarkably hamfisted politician.
Hour From Copenhagen
Obama: FAIL.
Update: In the New York review of Books, Michael Tomasky writes on the right wing street protests and the noise machine, and Elizabeth Drew examines Obama’s performance in office through the prism of the healthcare debate:
This is 24-hr-news-cycle stuff taken to its natural conclusion (with added intellectual ‘credibility’.)
Were there any ‘Rudd Government Fail’ pieces this time last year?
Hmmm, perhaps I was a bit mistaken about Taibbi. I haven’t read much of him since the campaign.
I disagree with his conclusions, though at least he’s interested in the real world process of it all, just like Hitchens used to be before he got into a war fever & spiralled down to the point of boasting, “The US army guys in Bagdhad started calling me ‘Black Hawk Hitchens.’”
(Hunter S Thompson, OTOH, was never into detail. At all. ‘Coz he was basically John Wayne for Leftwing dickheads—trying to make sense of things like actual policy was beneath the inspiring role he played at.)
Which Persians and what for Rewi?
I don’t know if they did ‘pisstakes’ in ancient Persia, Peter. It’s tempting to assume they did.
Really, Mark, hamfisted? In what way? I seem to recall Clinton getting into much bigger problems. And remember: Clinton wasn’t elected to his first term with anything like Obama’s support (he wasn’t even elected with a majority).
Obama’s poll numbers have been moving up again. And if he manages to pass a public option on healthcare, he’ll likely consolidate much of that support.
Well, perhaps so, Ginja, but it’ll have been an unnecessarily rocky road getting there.
i think he has indeed shelved those missiles in the Czech Rep and Poland Fran See here so that is a success of sorts, even if the Patriot missile batteries will still go in as part of the original agreement inked by Condy. Second point, Obama can hardly be blamed for Pakistan tearing itself apart… this issue has been brewing long before he took office. what is more, he is not in a position to solve that one. Remember what happened last time the US went in to sorve a fialed state in Mogadishu? Pakistan is bigger and has nukes in addition to Kalashnikovs.
Shorter Mark: Katz is incorrect. But put another way, she may be right.
It’s a precept, not a putative precept. And it’s not mine. Disraeli should be acknowledged.
To follow Disraeli’s precept is not to “map out another strategy.”
One merely needs to achieve some understanding of the impediments to achieving the preferred strategy.
Some of those impediments may be overcome. Others are insuperable.
I think his ‘success’ depends on how you define it. The reason I think Obama has been a huge success is a quote from a PBS newshour story:
a recent Pew poll in predominantly Muslim countries shows support in Indonesia for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has fallen 34 points, to 25 percent in recent years. Support for suicide bombings dropped by a half, to 13 percent.
Anies Baswedan, an expert on Islam and politics, says the sympathy one heard after earlier bomb blasts largely disappeared after the last U.S. presidential election.
ANIES BASWEDAN, professor, Paramadina University: During the Bush years, people were often seeing — saying, this is terrible, the bombings is terrible, but look what happened in Afghanistan, look what happened in Iraq, how many thousands of people were killed out there. So, this is nothing. That’s the message they have got to see.
But, today, people are saying, why are you doing this? Because the — Obama is there, the tone of the relationship has changed.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july-dec09/indonesia_10-22.html
err … for Disraeli above. Read Bismarck.
Mark@28
I know that’s how it was oft reported in the early stages, but I always felt there was a clear strategy. Which was to (1) start the conversation (2) allow the repugs time to max out on hysterical nonsense like “death panels” (3) wait for the silliness to wear itself out (4) reenter the fray with the tide turning in his favour.
Result: healthcare passed, GOP shown to be party of shrill, deceitful, corporate lackeys with no real interest in ordinary Americans.
Just amazing that Obama people are so keen to say he is a failure after a handful of months even though he has just replaced a President who basically trashed American foreign relations, credibility, dream and economy. The worst and in the end probably most hated President in American history.
No mention of the fact that Obama did a 180 degree on foreign relations, methodology, bought back diplomacy and restored belief, trust and credibility of the USA in just a few months. I guess that is not important – a fail, hey! Or that he took the stimulus path toward repairing the American economy with some huge numbers.
No mention that he has had to take over an America in the worst shape it has ever been in since the 1930s and with that a repulsive, virulent hateful Republican opposition and an incessant major right wing media movement both rabid and dishonest in every respect.
Obama has had to battle a tsunami of right wing hate willing to denigrate him in any way possible. And sure enough if you throw enough of this meme around for long enough even LP and many others will fall prey to the tactic.
Honestly has stupid is it to rate a President like this after a handful of months in office and in one of the most difficult situations of any President.
Really I just think you guys just need something to criticise and hand wring over.
It is a bit early to judge but Obiwan did set the bar pretty high promising to stop the oceans rising etc.
“Obiwan did set the bar pretty high promising to stop the oceans rising etc.”
And they haven’t risen during his 10 months as POTUS. Success!
But really. Just how the fuck do you judge a President, or other leader, a success these days? We all got richer? Less terrorists? Peace with honour? No child left behind? A chicken in every pot? “It didn’t get worse”.
No one can even agree on a metric for judging our leaders, let alone a metric for judging those that judge our leaders.
Personally? Great sex, drugs and escalating income during the Hawke-Bush pere-Clinton years. This metric may not work for you but I had a damn good time back then while not voting for any of ‘em.
Time to start the Warren Harding revival. “A return to normalcy”. “I am not fit for this office.”
So…this is all good news for John McCain then?
Stopping the rising oceans has got to be the perfect unfulfillable political promise (mixed metaphor, sorry). An extremely emotional issue is addressed, and no-one is likely to know if the promise has been lived up to for quite some time – ie, Obama will most likely be dead and buried by the time oceans really do start to rise. Or don’t.
Kind of stands in opposition’ to K. Rudd’s ‘Laptop for every school’ promise – much more measurable, that one.
I don’t know what magical expectations the now-Obama critics had going in, but this is all a little “what have you done for me lately” in tone and strikingly ignorant of pretty much any president’s first months. That the House and Senate are actually progressing in legislating national health care is a remarkable achievement, and it’s Obama’s, not Reid’s or Pelosi’s. It was Bill Clinton who showed himself as “hamfisted”, crudely using his wife to come up with a plan from behind closed doors, whereas this President has gotten the legislature – individuals highly beholden to both their constituents and the “special interest groups” and corporations, each often if not always in conflict – to move this fundamental change forward.
This is what I think is the bigger story of what’s happening in the US (as it concerns Australia).
Touch wood, it seems Australia will likely avoid a recession. Or at least a deep one. Business commenators have basically declared the GFC over in Australia, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Australia more or less follows trends in the US in economics and increasingly in politics generally. So if Keynes is restored to his proper place in all the economic theory coming out of the US, and if US politics takes on a more progressive tone, that will influence Australian politics.
And if we’re lucky enough to get all that without the scarring experience of meltdown in our banking sector and a deep recession, that seems like a pretty good deal.
I think one of the big problems with Bromwich’s article is he doesn’t really engage with the legislative process, echoed in this thread by Mole @ 14. Anyone who thinks Obama has control over the Democractic party in Congress really needs to pop over to Ezra Klein and read up – he’s in a far weaker position than many seem to realise, especially viz. the Senate.
Economic issues have replaced cultural ones as the main line of public controversy but this has been less favorable than the left expected.
That’s a very interesting observation, Geoff.
I agree with Geoff that economic issues are much more important than cultural ones. Someone – I can’t remember who – made the observation that the 1920s in the US was a time when cultural issues were to the fore – issues like prohibition or teaching evolution in schools. Then the depression came.
I’d disagree strongly that economic issues won’t favour the Left. First, taxes will rise all around the world, narrowing out-of-control levels of inequality. Second, serious economic thinkers know just how close we came to an “extinction-level event” with the GFC. You know something has changed when neo-liberals like Martin Wolf have become born-again Keynesians and regulators.
Remember, too, that Roosevelt was unusual in that he responded to the Great Depression reasonably well. In Australia, the UK, and most of Europe the depression years were actually a disaster for the Left. It was only later that people turned to the Left (though that turning to the Left had a great deal to do with the Depression).
Economic issues have are perceived and debated through a cultural prism.
The terms may look economic but the enmities continue to be cultural.
Since 2001 very few Americans have changed their minds about economic solutions or about cultural allegiances.
Bush lost it for the Right because he was a transparent twerp not because his core ideology has been repudiated.
Too ture, Katz – about culture being inevitably mixed with economics.
Has there been any revival of interest in Forgan Smith in Qld? After all, he was the closest Australia came to having a New Dealer in power (Ted Theodore being ignored).
…I meant too true.
Rope-a-dope.
I’d disagree strongly that economic issues won’t favour the Left. First, taxes will rise all around the world, narrowing out-of-control levels of inequality.
I love it when you accidentally tell the truth about your agenda! You obviously don’t realise that as well as failing to address inequity, general tax rises will kill prosperity.
What the world really needs now is another Reagan-Thatcher double act to get things moving positively again.
PeterB, my agenda is out there for all the world to see.
I’m part of the Fabian-UN-black-helicopters world conspiracy.
I believe in progressive taxation. I believe inequality has gotten out of hand.
I completely disagree that there is a link between low taxation and prosperity. It’s bunk. Bill Clinton raised taxes on higher income earners and the US economy boomed. George Bush lowered taxes for the wealthy and the US is currently in a deep depression.
In this, as in so many other areas of economics, Reaganism just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
In Australia we had very high top marginal tax rates, yet we still had a post-war boom. I happen to think that that middle-class society that was created in Australia (and other developed countries) at that time was a pretty decent one – one built on the back of high taxation for the over-privileged.
I believe our economy would be more prosperous and our society would benefit if we raised the various taxes paid by the wealthy.
No hidden agenda here mate!
Now, let the Right say what they really believe….hang on, I’ll just get a stiff drink.
….deep recession I should say – thanks to Keynesian economics a deep depression has been avoided!
@31
“but it’ll have been an unnecessarily rocky road getting there”
Compared to what. And if you are correct the question needs to be asked: who is placing the rocks in the road? Others have pointed out that Obama has inherited a deeply fractious polity and a sorely (perhaps fatally) wounded economy. It would be a leader of almost unimaginable strength who could drive the nation in one direction, indeed it would probably take a crisis of the utmost seriousness before the nation was shaken out of its hysterical, psychotic state.
Of course this did happen 8 years ago, unfortunately the country was ruled by the shallowest collection of sneak thieves ever to control the executive branch.
So leaven your criticism of Obama with reflections on what might of been had he had the chance to take a shattered but defiant citizenry and ply them with some wisdom.
Absolutely. About 50 trillion dollars disappeared out of the international financial system during the meltdown last year. If ever there was a time for priming the economy, it was then. Talk about inflation fears was ludicrous. Deflation was – or should have been – the big fear.
Keynsian economics kept the economy running. When the government lets it go to hell because they believe it will right itself you get what happened in 1929-32 where the US economy shrank 48 percent and lost the equivilent of an entire year’s GDP in that short time. We avoided that disaster this time around.
True Brendon.
Back to PeterTB: the Right seems to forget that Reagan initially cut taxes but then had to go back and raise them when the deficit got out of control.
They also assert that Reagan’s tax cut pulled the country out of recession in the early eighties. Serious economists are much more inclined to point to Paul Volcker finally easing up on inflation.
Ideology and revisionism – nothing to do with reality.
It was Reagan and Thatcher and all their followers, with their deregulation ideology, that got us into this mess.
and all their followers
Amongst whom you would presumably include Paul Keating?
What mess would that be? It seems from recent developments that the death of capitalism was welcomed prematurely – and business as usual is about to resume.
Tune the regulations a bit and away we go!
Speaking of inappropriate regulation, what about the inappropriate loans that successive US administrations more or less forced US banks to extend to poor credit risks? I thought that we had consensus that these were one of the major factors that triggered the recent hiccup.
Too much government interference once again leads to a poor outcome.
More less than more.
But thanks for Right Wing Talking Points, Hits and Memories, anyway.
Hiccup? Is that the same as the Great Black Sniffle of the 14th century?
Yes, including Paul Keating. Keating did many things that a progressive can applaud – introduction of capital gains tax, fringe benefits tax, Medicare Mark 2, the social wage – and many things progressives most definitely wouldn’t applaud.
What mess would that be? Honestly, millions around the world are thrown out of work, much of the world’s financial system is only being kept afloat by massive government bailouts, world trade collapses at a faster rate than during the Great Depression, governments have their revenues fall through the floor and have to stimulate like mad, and right-wingers say, problem? What problem?
And explain to me how one little government initiative – that had been around 30-odd years – can bring down the entire world financial system? Maybe markets don’t work as well as the Right would have us believe. Use a bit of common sense my lad! Do right-wingers ever stop to question the plausibility of lines they’ve been fed by Republicans and the Murdoch press?
If Obama manges to fulfill two thirds of the 515 promises* on that site deconst links to, and avoids any major missteps elsewhere, they’re going to need to start carving out his face on Mt Rushmore. Seriously, it would leave him clearly the best president since Roosevelt, and probably the most popular after a few years have passed.
So far he hasn’t tackled most of them, but given they way new ones keep ticking over (eg the end to the ban on HIV+ve entrants to the US) its certainly not possible to say he won’t. If he gets Healthcare with a public option through (even a weak public option) a lot of other possibilities will suddenly open up.
Looking at the seven he’s broken only one (#240) really bothers me. The rest were minor or made necessary by changed circumstances. I haven’t looked through all the compromises, but it doesn’t look to me like there are major sellouts there.
* I’m assuming this is not achieved by failing on the larger promises and racking up success on all the smaller ones.
So Obama didn’t turn out to the messiah after all huh. He’s still not George Bush though, so at least he has that going for him.
Wingnuts believe terrorist!