I’m happy Barack Obama won.
I’ve been outspoken on this site about the need to break up the nation’s stagnant political duopoly by supporting alternative candidates and parties. And I’ve meant every word of it. But of course the nation subjected itself to a simple binary of Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney. And in that scenario, I’ll take Obama. I didn’t vote for him, but I was rooting for him.
However, if you’re liberal or progressive, and many (though hardly all) of the people who read this website are, you need to be wary amid the glow of victory. Ask yourself: What have you automatically gained with Obama’s victory?
Compromise, ineptitude, and even outright lies are all hallmarks of our political system. We cannot take any of our politicians at their word. None of them, not even the ones we might like. And Barack Obama is a good example of that. In 2008, he made many promises, some of which he kept, and some of which he did not.
The Tampa Bay Times, a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper with a generally liberal bent, has been keeping track of Obama’s broken campaign promises from 2008 at its PolitFact website. The list runs five pages long with 86 items in all.
Of course some, perhaps most of these aborted dreams aren’t Obama’s fault, or are only partially his fault. Many of his promises were predicated on passing new laws or repealing old ones, and that’s primarily Congress’s job. For example, Obama tried to do things like repeal the Bush tax credits for high 
income earners, but a hostile Congress has thwarted him during the past two years.
Promising to do things he couldn’t achieve may have been irresponsible, but all politicians do it. Then again, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during Obama’s first two years in office, so missed opportunities are part of the equation as well.
But not all the unfulfilled promises are about battles Obama can’t win or a willingness to compromise. Most disconcerting is the large number of issues that do not require any Congressional approval because they fall well within the president’s discretionary power as the chief executive. There are many issues he simply didn’t follow up on when he had the chance. Some of the broken promises cited at PolitFact are not legislative. Obama had the authority to unilaterally implement many of them. Yet he hasn’t.
By my count, there are no less than twenty-five items on the Tampa Bay Times list of broken promises that the president could have very easily kept. Nearly a third of the list required little more than a simple executive order, or in many cases, Obama could have just opened his mouth and publicly proclaimed things he said he would but hasn’t.
Leading this hit parade was the Democrat’s promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In case you’d forgotten, it’s still up and running. That can still, and hopefully will be fixed. Though sadly, it’s too late to make 
good on some promises that the president either botched or perhaps lied about. For example, he said he would negotiate healthcare reform in public sessions televised on C-SPAN.
So much for that.
However, others can still be accomplished if Obama so desires. And now that he has won re-election, he has another four years to make good on that and many other unfulfilled pledges from 2008. Not to mention all the new promises he’s made this time around. So here here is a Top Ten list of unfulfilled promises leftover from the first term that Obama can still easily accomplish if he so chooses.
- Introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill during his first year; passage is another matter, but at least get it introduced.
- Ban his political appointees from working on regulations or contracts related to their prior employer for two years after leaving government; and ban all of his former political appointees from lobbying the executive branch for the remainder of his administration.
- Create a database that discloses how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and which contracts they receive.
- Expose special interest tax breaks to public scrutiny.
- Create an independent watchdog agency to investigate congressional ethics violations.
- Allow five days of public comments before signing bills into law.
- Develop an alternative to President Bush’s Military Commissions Act for handling detainees.
- Give an annual State of the World Address.
- Give an annual report on the state of the nation’s energy future.
- Recognize the Armenian genocide.
If you’re happy that Barack Obama won, I’m not here to rain on your parade. I’m relatively happy too. So celebrate. Enjoy and revel in it today.
But tomorrow, begin holding Obama’s feet to the fire. Pressure this prince of soaring rhetoric to accomplish more of what he has promised. Do whatever you can to make sure he becomes the president you want him to be, the president he said he would be.
For politicians, attaining power is just the start. The real question is what they do with it. Likewise, for citizens, voting is just the beginning. There are many other important ways to be politically engaged. So tomorrow the real work begins, for him and for us.