Here’s a great video [1] put out by the NRSC [2] regarding candidate Obama’s promises on domestic issues versus President Obama’s actions on domestic issues (via Lorie Byrd [3]):
Now, a lot of the promises he made during the campaign we were hoping he wouldn’t keep, like his stance on the detention of suspected terrorists, which he ridiculed the Bush administration over, but has now essentially done a 180 on [4]. But there were other promises he made during his campaign, some mentioned in the video, that would have been nice to be able to believe: like promise to cut out pork and earmarks, and to be more fiscally responsible with the people’s money, but guess what? That hasn’t happened. And the people whose heads weren’t stuck in the clouds (or the sand, whichever way you want to look at it) knew to begin with that it wasn’t going to happen. You can’t come into a presidency promising to be “fiscally responsible” when you’ve already got a huge defict and instead of making plans to whittle it down, you plan to add trillions more to it with massive amounts of entitlement spending – spending which makes Bush look like a deficit hawk by comparison [5] – and at the same time suggest that to pay for it we’ve got to “spread the wealth” – also known as gouging “the rich,” you know, those evil capitalists who help create jobs in this country.
Being that it’s two months into his presidency, you’ve got presidential “experts” and Obama supporters suggesting that it’s “too early” to make a judgement on how well he’s doing and that he “needs time” for things to “work” before we can assess the decisions he’s made so far. I beg to differ. You can’t spend your way out of a recession, and you can’t start a path towards enabling businesses to create massive amounts of jobs by taxing the hell out of the businesses that create them in the first place. This ain’t rocket science.
Of course, this brings us to the “gotcha” issue of whether or not conservatives want to see Obama fail. Former Senator and former contender for the GOP nomination for president Fred Thompson got it exactly right in an interview he did with CNN yesterday [6]:
Thompson told CNN’s John Roberts Wednesday that he agreed with some of his fellow Republicans who have said publicly they do not want the president’s policies to be successful.
“I want his policies that I believe take us in the wrong direction to fail,” Thompson told Roberts on CNN’s American Morning.
“If he takes us down the road of tripling our national debt in ten years and making us vulnerable to higher interest rates and higher inflation, and things of that nature, I want all those policies not to succeed,” he said.
Thompson, who made the rising cost of entitlement spending a focus of his 2008 presidential run, said he’d be happy to help Obama overhaul those programs.
“If he wants to do that, I will join with him. I’ll do everything I can to make him succeed with regard to that because that’s the whole ball game in terms of our fiscal future in this country,” said the former Tennessee senator.
Thompson criticized Obama’s ambitious health care agenda, telling Roberts the president’s plans would cost the government more than they would save.
Here’s the video [7]:
At the annual GOP fundraiser Tuesday night, Gov. Jindal took a similar approach [9]:
It’s OK for Republicans to want President Obama to fail if they think he’s jeopardizing the country, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told members of his political party Tuesday night.
Jindal described the premise of the question — “Do you want the president to fail?” — as the “latest gotcha game” being perpetrated by Democrats against Republicans.
“Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, ‘Why no sir, I don’t want the president to fail,’ is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism,” Jindal said at a political fundraiser attended by 1,200 people. “This is political correctness run amok.”
[…]
Jindal, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, told the Republican audience he would “not be brow beaten on this, and I will not kowtow to their correctness.”
“My answer to the question is very simple: ‘Do you want the president to fail?’ It depends on what he is trying to do.”
Amen to that. And why is it, by the way, that when this subject comes up that Democrats never get asked if they wanted Bush to succeed? I’ve even helpfully provided a list of Bush policies and ideas [10] that the MSM could use as part of the questioning on that front. But no, you won’t see a Democrat asked that question, because the dodging and weaving they’d have to go through in order not to sound like Rush Limbaugh would make it obvious that they felt the same about Bush and his policies and most Republicans feel towards Obama and most of his. And then that would end the whole silly “debate” over whether or not it’s right or wrong to want a President to fail.
But I digress.
Anyway, Obama’s made his bed on the issues of fiscal responsiblity and “growing” the economy and now he he has to lay (or would “lie” be the better word?) in it. In the process, he’s shown that those of us who predicted last year that he and the Democrats in Congress would take fiscal irresponsibility to a whole new level and would enact policies that would, in effect, choke the private sector, are being proven right.
Yet another example of a “Toldjah So” that I don’t relish pointing out.