Call Him Barry Backpedal

Our nation’s President-elect is learning that community organizing really is not sufficient experience to manage the world’s most powerful bureaucracy. Campaiging on platitudes learned during his adventures in the Chicago ghetto was much easier. The complexities a serious Presidential candidate should have grasped are leading Barry to forsake his glorious promises.

End “tax breaks” for “the rich”? Not anymore. Usher in a new era of world peace and civility? Nope. Reduce the Federal deficit? Uh, one two trillion times no. Bring the troops home? Well, uh, the war in Iraq ended before he could take credt. But, um, he is keeping his promise to keep them deployed somehwere. He does still promise to close Gitmo, but we don’t know when:

Barack Obama, the US president-elect, has appeared to soften his election campaign promise to shut the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay as one of his first acts as US president, saying its closure would be "a challenge".

"It is more difficult than a lot of people realise ..." Obama said during an interview aired on Sunday with US broadcaster ABC.

"I think it's going to take some time ... but I don't want to be ambiguous about this - we are going to close Guantanamo," he told the This Week programme.

Another example is the total about-face on his Hope and Change campaign mantra:

There is something very different and disturbing about Obama’s message, and that is his deep pessimism about America. Despite the lip service paid to the hope/change campaign message of uplift, his negativity comes through loud and clear.

Of course, Obama’s latest economic speech is being given in the context of trying to motivate legislation he will be proposing, especially his huge and controversial stimulus package, which jumps (rather than wades) into deep and uncharted waters. But if you read excerpts from his speech, you will see how extraordinarily gloomy it is, couched in the language of the dire consequences of what could happen if Obama’s plan isn’t realized.

As Neo-neocon observes, in the his post-election pronouncements Obama has become an anti-FDR, telling us we have everything to fear. Barry now exhibits the audacity of despair:

For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs,” Mr. Obama warned. “More families will lose their savings. More dreams will be deferred and denied. And our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

I hear many voices urging us to give Obama a chance. After all, they say, He hasn’t even been coronated yet. Looks like Barry himself is better aligned with my own sentiment, that his gauzy visions and all those lofty promises were just hot air.

H/T: Maggie’s Farm

UPDATE: The New York Times has a list of dreams delayed, too:

Although Mr. Obama has not publicly identified which priorities will have to wait, advisers and allies have signaled that they may put off renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, overhauling immigration laws, restricting carbon emissions, raising taxes on the wealthy and allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military.

Via: TJIC and Marginal Revolution