Indeed he is. “Pork and earmarks will go, right after I sign this bill full of pork and earmarks”. Of course, he had no choice, but couldn’t he just have kept his mouth shut about stopping the way Washington works?
Pulled between his campaign rhetoric and his own party’s congressional barons, President Barack Obama largely sided with his Hill allies in unveiling an earmark proposal Wednesday that shies away from any strict crackdown on the practice.
Obama proposed further transparency for the spending goodies prized by many members of Congress – but stopped far short of the kind of serious limits reformers wanted.
Well, the joke is on all of us who thought this president would be any different than the others. After all, George W. Bush ran on being a small-government, close-to-home, humble-foreign-affairs president, but in stead we got a spend’em-and-whack’em president with no humility on the global stage. Nick Gillespie: Bush Was A Big-Goverment Disaster.
Well, what’d you expect anyway – Obama’s a politician, not a saint.
One difference though is that Obama appears to be an intelligent and passionate person who actually wants to do the right thing. This alone would seem to represent a huge improvement wrt Bush.
But apart from that … politics’ a bitch. Even if he *was* a saint, there’s still little enough wriggle room in the mandate of an American president, and Obama doesn’t seem to be a “rock-the-boat” type.
Executive summary: If you expected a new president who is slightly better than George Bush, you got it – this has shown on quite a few points already.
If you expected much more than that, well, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Being a better president than George W. Bush doesn’t necessarily make anyone a *good* president.
Well, Obama didn’t run on a platform of being “A little better than Bush” did he? He ran on reforming Washington – no earmarks, no b**shit, no partisanship. What are we getting? Earmarks galore and partisanship all the way to the Exit.
I think it is extremely, extremely sad that we now not only expect our politicians to not keep their promises, but even excuse their actions with “Well waddaya know, the world’s not perfect” – or even find them quite understandable: “Well, you have to lie a little to get power. But he’s better han Bush!”
I think it is far too early to say that Obama is going to be any better than Bush. Lot’s of promises – only action so far has been to spend a gigantic sum of money on in my view very doubtful projects (including billions for earmarks, wealthty banks and wealthy carmarkers), and upscale the war in Afghanistan. However, he has taken no real action to reform the banking sector, and his heath reform is definitely going in the wrong direction (and will probably not be implemented anyway).
Positive policy from Obama here:
https://www.whiteberg.dk/2009/03/12/obamas-n%c3%b8dvendige-reform/
Actually, I don’t disagree with you that the earmark bill is unfortunate. Only I was saying that rather than a wholesale betrayal this bill bay represent an attempt on the OA’s side to forge alliances and navigate what’s possible. Since he’s a president, not a dictator, he can only go as far as Congress will let him in many respects.
He’s also reversed important Bush policies, including the ban on financial support to groups that promote birth control and abortion. On the other hand, its stance on copyright and ACTA is *really* embarassing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/14/partial-list-of-corp.html