The Obama Promise: Then and Now
The president's own economic words are coming back to haunt him.
By STEPHEN MOORE
Barack Obama now faces perhaps his most politically crippling deficit of all: a credibility deficit.
That observation is reflected in the latest Bloomberg poll, which finds that on the heels of his big jobs speech last Thursday night, more than half of Americans (51%) do not believe the president's claim that this latest $447 billion spend-and-tax-or-borrow scheme will create new jobs.
"As the economy has gotten worse, people have stopped listening to Obama and his speeches are no longer an asset, they're a liability," concludes Kellyanne Conway, president of the Polling Company. That is because the gulf between three years of rhetoric and reality is so gigantic.
It is hard to make a persuasive case for a $447 billion economic stimulus plan that looks and sounds so much like the $830 billion plan that Americans were sold two-and-a-half years ago. That first plan didn't "create or save" the 3.5 million jobs the White House promised, and most Americans don't agree with Vice President Biden that it worked beyond his "wildest dreams." Tell that to the 14 million Americans—two million more than when all the spending and borrowing began—who are still out of work, or the tens of millions who do have jobs but have seen their income drop in the last two years.
American voters can't conceive of how $447 billion of more debt and spending will create jobs when the last three years have already given us $4 trillion of new debt with no jobs. What is even harder to believe is the president's assurance that the new American Jobs Act "will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for." How can this plan be paid for when the first, $830 billion, plan has never been paid for?
While running for president Mr. Obama promised "pay as you go budgeting," and in February 2009 during his "fiscal responsibility summit" he sounded like Ronald Reagan when he said that "this is the rule that families across this country follow every single day, and there's no reason why their government shouldn't do the same." But the Obama government isn't doing the same. It is doing the opposite.
Here's another Obama promise that sounds like a whopper today. In 2008 he pledged he would "go through our federal budget—page by page, line by line—eliminating those programs we don't need, and insisting that those we do operate in a sensible cost-effective way." That hasn't happened.
In the wake of the lousy economic news, Mr. Obama, who promised a new era of "accountability," has blamed the ongoing jobs recession on "a run of bad luck." Who knew there would be a tsunami in Japan, disruptions in the oil supply from the Mideast—when has that ever happened before?—and so many other job-killing events beyond the president's control?
The green jobs revolution we were expecting to put America back to work is also browning out. A new Department of Energy study finds that between 2007 and 2010, clean-energy subsidies more than doubled. But after billions of taxpayer handouts have been pumped year after year into solar and wind power, these two industries supply 2.4% of America's electricity.
Mr. Obama says he wants to make America less dependent on foreign oil, but this week he called again for raising taxes on domestic oil and gas production. He said last year that he believes America is "running out of places to drill" even though in the last five years new discoveries of oil and natural gas have occurred in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Dakota, Texas, Montana and Colorado—causing a near doubling in U.S. recoverable reserves.
Mr. Obama said in his speech on Thursday that health-care costs are a major contributor to the debt and need to be reined in. He neglected to mention what voters surely remember, which is that last year Mr. Obama signed a health-care law that adds at least 30 million more Americans to Medicaid—the program Mr. Obama now says is the problem. During the debate over ObamaCare the White House insisted that the fees in the plan for not purchasing health insurance were not a tax. But arguing before the courts on the constitutionality of the law, the White House now says these are taxes. Which is it?
Mr. Obama says he has been one of the most constantly attacked presidents in history and he is probably right about that. But his attackers in the conservative movement aren't likely to be his undoing. His most damning persecutors are his own words and promises. The problem for President Obama is that fewer voters are listening to him. There's no blaming George W. Bush for that.
Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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