Weekly Standard ^ | July 16, 2012 | Peter Wehner
Barack Obama has an accountability problem. It’s not simply that during the 2008 campaign he made extravagant promises to heal the planet, slow the rise of the oceans, end political divisions in America, and usher in an era of hope and change. It’s that as a candidate and in the early days of his presidency, Obama and his top aides made a series of very specific promises on a range of issues.
As a candidate, Obama promised to create five million new energy jobs alone, claimed that by the end of his first term his health care plan would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family,” and guaranteed that his financial rescue plan would help “stop foreclosures.” As president-elect, Obama informed us that he had asked two of his top economic advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, to conduct a “rigorous analysis” of his economic recovery plan. The report that he released predicted unemployment would not rise above 8 percent if the stimulus plan was passed. And in the first year of his presidency, Obama pledged to “cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office,” “lift two million Americans from poverty,” and “jolt our economy back to life.”
The problem for Obama is that his predictions were not only wrong; they were terribly wide of the mark. ....
(snip) The “We Couldn’t Possibly Have Known How Bad It Was” narrative is an understandable one for Obama to resort to. But like so much of what the president says these days, it’s simply make-believe. The president has run out of excuses, which explains why for many Americans he’s just about run out of time.
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