January 9th, 2010:

Re:  Obama Year One | The American Prospect, Paul Starr | December 24, 2009 

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

As Barack Obama ends his first year in office, there is much talk about disillusionment with the president among progressives. The litany of complaints is obvious: unemployment still at 10 percent, economic policies unduly favorable to Wall Street, the surge in Afghanistan, compromises on health care, the failure to close down Guantánamo, and a general inability to bring about the transformative change that Obama spoke of during his campaign. 

Policy has certainly not moved as fast or as far as many of us would like. But perhaps because I never shared the political fantasies about Obama in the first place, I don’t feel let down, and I don’t think other liberals should. No president was about to turn the country around on a dime — the structure of our government doesn’t allow it. And anyone who paid attention to what Obama said as a candidate about specific matters of policy would have realized he wasn’t the lefty some imagined and others feared. 

Every president has had to walk back some of their campaign promises. Ronald Reagan had to raise taxes – 6 times. 

No one president broke more campaign promises than George W. Bush, but you don’t hear about that because the main stream media sides with Republicans. Bush promised on the campaign trail, during the primaries of 2000, that he would fully fund the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). His FY 2003 budget slashed funding for LIHEAP by $300 million or 18% of the previous year’s allotment. 

During the campaign of 2000, Bush said, “Every year, U.S. colleges attract the best and the brightest students from all over the world. I want to make sure that higher education is affordable and accessible to every American. And therein lie our greatest weaknesses: college tuition and the burden of student indebtedness. I am committed to helping families prepare for the cost of higher education.” Then, in 2002, Bush slashed the federal student loan program by $1.3 billion. 

Bush also promised not to spend the Social Security surplus. But it was spent, anyway, on an unnecessary war. 

There is something here that I have often repeated. President Obama has never been a progressive, but progressives have painted that portrait on him by somehow mistaking their agenda as something that he has promised to do, but has failed. One promise in contention is the health insurance mandate, or the requirement that everyone have health insurance. This was not his idea, but Hillary Clinton’s. 

The news of late have shown snippets of the President at the podium in 2008 during the campaign lambasting Hillary Clinton’s insurance mandate. Now, the Senate health bill has the mandate and the President gets blamed for breaking the campaign promise of being against a mandate. 

For starters, Obama’s plan had an insurance mandate for children, but not for all, as did Clinton’s. Studies done by the Lewin Group and others at that time suggested that Clinton’s plan would be the one closest to “universal coverage” depending on the strength of the penalties for noncompliance. 

What is striking with this example is that when you compare both Obama’s and Clinton’s campaign health plans, you will quickly discover that they their focuses were on insurance reform, not health care reform. Then, compare those plans with Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s plan, you’ll see a stark difference. Kucinich promoted health care reform, not insurance reform, with his plan of Medicare For All. 

Here’s my message to progressives, of which I consider myself also. If you go back and read through some of their policy statements on the campaign trail you will find that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama were progressive, but rather left-leaning centrists. If progressives wanted a progressive candidate they should have voted for one.The progressive’s disappointment is no one’s fault but their own.

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