Crimes Against Liberty (10 page)

Obama held himself out as transformative all right, but also above ideology. It’s difficult to be transformative from the center, however, or even to make that case. In the end, that’s a major reason Obama’s campaign was so filled with platitudes and vague, emotional catch phrases such as “hope” and “change.” By luck he came onto the presidential scene when we were beset by financial crises and the public had grown weary of the Iraq war. Obama seized on the public’s mood, played their fears like a virtuoso musician, and depicted America as being in dire straights from which only he could deliver us. By playing up the crisis mentality, and with unprecedented support and cover from the press, he was able to get away with his vacuous slogans without ever defining them.

It didn’t take long for Obama to reveal his true colors once in office. He had sold himself as post-racial, bipartisan, sagacious and mature beyond his years, effortlessly fluent and articulate, moderate, transparent, honest, non-ideological, and open to opposing views. But inside a few months, he showed himself to be deeply racial, aggressively partisan, grossly incompetent, often verbally awkward apart from his teleprompter, an inflexible liberal ideologue, secretive, dishonest, undemocratic, dogmatic and dictatorial, and intolerant and dismissive of his opposition.

His signature “charismatic charm” and “congeniality” soon degenerated into what
Washington Examiner
White House correspondent Julie Mason described as his “irritation, imperiousness and dissatisfaction.” “More than a year later” wrote Mason, “a different picture of Obama is emerging. Impatient with gainsayers and frustrated with political process, the president seems increasingly disenchanted as progress on his own agenda remains elusive.” She quoted Republican strategist Kevin Madden saying, “The entire 2008 Obama campaign was built around a cult of personality. He is totally lacking the kind of leadership skills you forge after a long time on Capitol Hill.”
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In fact, at this point Obama’s incompetent leadership had only begun to emerge, as we later realized with his disastrous mismanagement of the Gulf oil spill.

We’ll take a closer look in the next several chapters at how Obama’s true nature and personal attributes emerged during his first year-plus in office, and revealed that he was nothing like the messianic figure he had presented himself to be, in attitude or substance.

Chapter Three

THE LIAR

CRIMES AGAINST GOOD GOVERNANCE AND THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCY

O
bama was certainly duplicitous on the campaign trail, but he’s been even more deceitful in office. As an
Investors Business Daily
op-ed noted, “Barack Obama has an elastic (capable of being stretched) approach to reality. Facts that do not suit him are set aside and replaced with fabrications.... He is a master practitioner of sophistry.... In Washington, nearly everything said or done is calculated to deceive. Many of its residents are of the fabulist persuasion, but none compares to Obama.”
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While the typically cynical view is that all presidents break campaign promises, the truth is that some—like Obama—are worse than others. Not only has he already broken an astounding number of core campaign promises, but he’s done so with brazen dishonesty; when he breaks a promise, he simply changes it—retrospectively. Everything about him reeks of Alinskyite, end-justifies-the-means politics. It’s as if he’s saying he owes the electorate no moral obligation to live up to his promises, so long as he fundamentally transforms America—not in the ways he led us to believe he would, but toward a socialist utopia he
knows
will be better for us even though we disagree. What are a few hundred broken promises en route to nirvana? Let’s review a smattering of Obama’s broken promises and other deceits.

TRANSPARENCY

Obama promised to be the most transparent president in history and make himself readily available to the press—but at one point went over 300 days without a press conference. He has also been strongly critical of “foot high” budgets being “rushed through without any deliberation or debate.” The official White House website says, “Transparency—President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and
WhiteHouse.gov
will play a major role in delivering on that promise.” It further vows, “One significant addition to
WhiteHouse.gov
reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days. And allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.”
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Obama made the same promise during the campaign: “When there is a bill that ends up on my desk as a president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government is doing.”
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Obama grossly and repeatedly breached this promise. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act on January 20, 2009—two days after it passed Congress. He signed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program three hours after Congress passed it. He waited one business day to sign the enormous, far-reaching, $800 billion stimulus bill.
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The Cato Institute’s Jim Harper reported that as of April 13, 2009, Obama had broken this five-day posting pledge ten—arguably eleven—times out of the eleven bills he had signed. He only bothered to post six of the eleven bills on the website, and none were posted for a full five days. Only the DTV Delay Act came close.

Harper discounted the occasional White House efforts to satisfy the pledge by posting a bill while it was still pending in Congress, because they didn’t give the public ample time to review the
final
legislation. Most of the bills Obama signed, as those mentioned above, were signed within a day or two from their presentment from Congress. Other bills he signed without posting for five days include an appropriations bill and the omnibus spending bill.
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On the transformative ObamaCare legislation, the House passed the bill Sunday night, March 21, 2010, and Obama signed it two days later.

During the Democratic presidential primary campaign, Obama promised (the promise being captured on videotape no fewer than eight separate times)
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he would televise the healthcare debates on C-SPAN, in contrast to the Clintons’ attempt in the 1990s to broker HillaryCare behind closed doors. At a debate in Los Angeles on January 31, 2008, he declared, “That’s what I will do in bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process.”

But until the final few weeks of the process, he wouldn’t even allow Republicans to participate, much less open the process to the cameras. When asked about it in an interview, he dissembled, saying, “Now, keep in mind, most of the action was in Congress, so every committee hearing that was taking place, both in the House and the Senate, those were all widely televised. The only ones that were not were meetings that I had with some of the legislative leadership trying to get a sense from them in terms of what it was that they were trying to do.” Only after that qualifier did he grudgingly concede it was a “fair criticism.”
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PolitiFact
agreed, declaring his promise “broken.”
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In a townhall meeting a few days later, Obama rationalized his broken pledge again, saying it was “tricky” because if the proceedings were televised, some participants would just “posture” instead of debating honestly.
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He later admitted in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer that he would “own up” to his broken promise, but even here, he characterized it as a “legitimate mistake”—as if it had been unintentional. He also employed another Clintonesque personal accountability dodge in pretending he had played a passive role, assuring us he’d be addressing the fact that “the process didn’t run the way I ideally would like it to.”
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Pushing bills through Congress without the promised transparency was part of the Obama administration’s overall strategy to weaken the impact of any organized opposition. Another component of that strategy was to overwhelm the opposition with the sheer volume of programs the White House pushed at any one time, thus impeding Republicans’ ability to coordinate effective opposition.

But Obama doesn’t just owe the public answers about being AWOL on White House press conferences, his conducting of healthcare meetings in secret, or his failure to post bills in a timely manner on his website. We also deserve answers on his broken promises concerning lobbyists and, more consequential, his surreptitious packaging of unpopular provisions in larger pieces of legislation to avoid public scrutiny. These include his reversal of the highly successful welfare reform of the 1990s and his establishment of a super medical bureaucratic board (which some call a “death panel”), both of which were contained in his “stimulus” bill,
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as well as the government takeover of student loans buried within the ObamaCare bill.

He should come clean about myriad other deceptions as well: his townhall meetings where he took questions only from planted supporters; his phony assertions of executive privilege; his punitive firing of AmeriCorps watchdog Gerald Walpin for investigating his friend; his administration’s lack of accessibility on stimulus fund data; and his Justice Department’s dismissal of the already-won voter intimidation case against New Black Panther Party members, along with DOJ’s subsequent stonewalling of both the Civil Rights Commission and a Freedom of Information Act request by the
Washington Times
seeking reasons for the arbitrary dismissal.

He should explain his frequent denials of other FOIA requests; his FCC’s shielding of diversity czar Mark Lloyd from media questions about his past advocacy of using federal regulations to squelch conservative talk radio; his withholding of documents requested by Republicans from private meetings between the White House and medical providers; his withholding of data from the Cash for Clunkers program;
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his hiding of information on the expenditure of union dues; his failed effort to exclude FOX News from access to his pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg; and his “secret slush fund . . . for taxes and spending on climate change hidden inside the administration’s 2011 budget,” as reported by FOX News.
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BIPARTISANSHIP

Bipartisanship was unquestionably a central theme of Obama’s campaign. When he introduced Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate, he proclaimed Biden would “help me turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington, so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people.” In
USA Today
Obama wrote, “The only way to end the petty partisanship that has consumed Washington for so long and make a difference in the lives of ordinary Americans is by bringing Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people.”
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But as president, Obama deliberately and consistently cordoned Republicans off from the political process. He didn’t pass an agenda that “works for the American people,” but one that contradicted their express will. Only three Republican senators and no House Republicans supported his “stimulus” bill, while no GOP senators and no GOP House members voted for ObamaCare. In fact, the only evident bipartisanship was the opposition to ObamaCare in the House, where thirty-four Democrats joined all the Republicans in voting nay.
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“HE’S BEGINNING TO NOT BE BELIEVABLE TO ME”

Don’t confuse actual bipartisanship with Obama’s feints toward bipartisanship in order to advance his agenda. We saw this opportunism in his offer to drop the $50 billion fund in the financial reform bill, which sounds major but would not constitute any substantive change. We saw it in his false assertion that he’d adopted numerous Republican ideas in his healthcare bill. We saw it in his belated push for offshore oil drilling, his promise to jump start nuclear energy production, and his duplicitous overtures to the coal industry after he had promised to bankrupt it. Addressing Obama’s stated commitment to coal, Senator Jay Rockefeller complained Obama “says it in his speeches, but he doesn’t say it in [his 2011 budget proposal]. He doesn’t say it in the actions of [EPA Administrator] Lisa Jackson. And he doesn’t say it in the minds of my own people. And he’s beginning to not be believable to me.”
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We saw the same counterfeit bipartisanship in Obama’s pretend promise to look into tort reform as a means to curb some “defensive medicine [that] may be contributing to unnecessary costs”—while his Health and Human Services Department stated in a congressional staff report that medical malpractice reform was “not a priority” of the administration.
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A comically weak provision eventually made its way into the final healthcare bill, involving a negligible $50 million grant to states to launch “demonstration projects” to test tort reform. Lisa Rickard, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform, commented, “I don’t know anybody who thinks this is actual medical-liability reform, or finds this meaningful at all.... The bill is a demonstration of the interests of the trial bar over the views of the American people.”
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