Obama's empty promises

Barack Obama certainly made a good deal of promises when he was running for president, didn’t he? Whenever he spoke, it was always with the buzzwords “reform” and “change” and “hope.” It really made people think he was prepared to do something were he elected. But nearly a year after trouncing his Republican opponent, not much has actually been accomplished by the man touted by the international left as America’s savior (unless, of course, you count winning a Nobel Prize for waking up in the morning—in which case, good for you, Mr. President.).

Remember when he trumpeted the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detainment facility within a year of winning the presidency? Time marches on, and yet, Guantanamo is still very much in operation as a prison camp for some of this nation’s most dangerous and high-profile captives of the War on Terror. Although he found it not very difficult to criticize the previous administration’s policies regarding the detainment of suspected terrorists imprisoned there, he has found it increasingly difficult to solve the perceived problem in the “it’s so easy, even a child can do it” manner he spent much of the campaign promoting.

Or how about when he declared, in late 2007, that he wanted “to immediately begin to remove our combat troops” from Iraq, “Not in six months or one year—now!” It’s easy to make popular presidential decisions based on partisan rhetoric when you aren’t president. For someone who based so much of his campaign on withdrawal from Iraq, isn’t it interesting that, at present, we have 120,000 troops there with clear signs of regional stability? Indeed, causalities are down, and there is, by and large, respect among the Iraqi populace for the democratically elected government there.

Or—and this one is my personal favorite—what about President Obama’s July declaration that the United States would not “wait indefinitely” for Iran to accept nuclear non-proliferation protocols, and that Iran had until September to comply? As I write this one sunny afternoon near the end of October, Iran still has yet to comply, and the current administration hasn’t made so much as a peep about said protocols being blatantly ignored. So what’s stopping Ahmadinejad from playing the role of the teenager whose only real consequences for wrongdoing are hearing “you know son, if you don’t knock it off, you’re going to be in some real trouble,” a hundred times? Well, nothing, actually.

President Obama’s ability to enforce his own deadlines on the global scale has been about as successful as his ability to do so at home. When it comes to health care, earlier this year, he declared that Congress would pass sweeping reforms by the time it recessed in August. October is almost over, and health care reform has yet to be implemented. Although I don’t doubt that Nancy Pelosi may not be the most, shall we say, pleasant individual to work with, this administration’s failure to get through some semblance of reform on an issue that has long been a rallying point for liberals, when both houses of Congress are controlled by the president’s own party, is less than reassuring. Imagine what it must feel like to actually believe in President Obama’s position on health care.

It seems that President Obama, for all his fiery rhetoric and oratorical prowess, fell into the same trap that many other political candidates have fallen into: he knew exactly what to say and how to say it in order to best stir up partisanship in a post-Bush forty-three America, but now, faced with the challenges of actually implementing that rhetoric, he consistently falls short. It’s easy to criticize when you’re on the campaign trail, promising a new direction for a nation tired of eight years of presidential missteps and blunders. But it certainly is a lot harder once you’re actually in a position to enact what you once so fervently espoused. 

Of course, nothing is too difficult when you’re Barack Obama, right?