RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Obama's Broken Promises

Mark Ernst, in December 2007, was chief executive officer of H&R Block, the nation's largest tax-preparation company. Thirteen months later, once President Obama took office, Ernst was named a deputy commissioner at the Internal Revenue Service, where he would spend his first year drafting new regulations for tax preparers -- regulations that H&R Block welcomes and market analysts say will benefit the company.

With Ernst in mind, recall Barack Obama's campaign pledge: "No political appointees in an Obama administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years."

This campaign pledge manifested itself in an executive order requiring "every appointee in every executive agency" to pledge, "I will not for a period of 2 years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts."

Ernst obviously didn't follow these rules, but the IRS tells me that Ernst is not covered by these rules. "Mark Ernst is a civil servant at the IRS; he is not a political appointee," according to an e-mail IRS statement by an agency spokesman.

The statement continues: "The Presidential Executive order on Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel only applies to political appointees. ... [T]he extended two year Revolving Door Ban in the order does not apply [to Ernst]."

By the common understanding of the words, it's hard to swallow that Ernst is a "career" government employee, or a "civil servant" as opposed to an appointee or a political hire. First of all, he is clearly political: He contributed $9,900 to federal candidates in the last election -- with 90 percent going to Democrats, including the maximum contribution to Hillary Clinton.

Also, he is a retired CEO. He is not making a career as an IRS bureaucrat. And unlike most civil servants, Ernst came in with the new president, being named deputy commissioner in the first days of the Obama administration.

But for nearly every executive branch position, it's up to the administration whom to dub an "appointee" and who is a "civil servant." Had Obama hired Ernst as an "appointee" as opposed to a "civil servant," Ernst clearly would have violated Obama's rule prohibiting appointees from writing up regulations affecting recent employees.

Ernst was driven from H&R Block at the end of 2007 after a shareholder revolt spurred by the company's losses in the subprime mortgage industry.

In late January, less than 13 months after his last day at H&R Block, Ernst joined the IRS as deputy commissioner for operations. In that role, according to an IRS spokesman, Ernst acted as a "co-leader" in the process of drafting new regulations for paid tax preparers -- the industry led by H&R Block.

Investment bank UBS issued an analysis concluding: "The new regulations should help Block" by crowding out smaller competitors and granting the company a government stamp of approval.

To recap: A recent H&R Block CEO wrote regulations that help H&R Block, and this doesn't clash with the White House's "unprecedented" ethics rules.

These facts don't prove that Ernst was helping his former employer -- he may not even be in the good graces of H&R Block any more. The facts also don't prove that the regulation is bad.

The story of Ernst, however, does bring to light the worthlessness of Obama's ethics rules. There are other examples, too: Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn received a waiver to become deputy defense secretary. Mark Patterson, a Goldman Sachs lobbyist until April 2008, is the chief of staff at the Treasury Department, and hasn't even been given a waiver from the rules.

There's good reason to hire aides, like Lynn, Patterson, and Ernst, with experience in the industry they'll be regulating or dealing with. But it was Obama who decided to trumpet his restrictions on people entering the administration from the private sector. Now we can see that the ethics rules, like much of Obama's good-government talk, is more style than substance.

Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration. It has been, by almost any measure, a difficult and disappointing year for him and his party.

Mr. Obama now has the highest disapproval rating in Gallup’s history for a president entering his second year in office. According to a new Washington Post–ABC News poll, among independents, only 49 percent approve — the lowest of any of his recent predecessors at this point in their presidencies. (Obama has lost a stunning 18 points among independents in just a year’s time.) In November, Democrats suffered crushing defeats in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial campaigns — and if Republican Scott Brown prevails in his race against Martha Coakley in tomorrow’s Senate election in Massachusetts, it will rank among the most important non-presidential elections in our lifetime.

It has been a staggering collapse by a president who entered office with enormous support and an unprecedented amount of goodwill.

The reasons for this slide include unemployment rates that are much higher than the Obama administration predicted, job growth that never materialized despite the president’s promises, a record-setting spending binge, a massive and hugely unpopular health-care proposal, and an agenda that is far too liberal for most Americans.

But there is another, and I think quite important, explanation that was reinforced to me while reading John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book, Game Change, which is a fascinating (and very well-written) account of the 2008 presidential campaign.

One is reminded once again of how the core of Obama’s popularity was an appeal not to policy or to a governing agenda; instead it was an appeal to thematics and narrative. “Obama cast himself as a figure uncorrupted and unco-opted by evil Washington,” the authors write. He was the candidate who “promised to be a unifier and not a polarizer; someone nondogmatic and uncontaminated by the special-interest cesspool that Washington had become.” Obama’s appeal was romantic and aesthetic, built on the rhetoric of hope and change, on his “freshness and sense of promise.” A cult of personality built up around Obama — not because of what he had achieved but because of what he seemed to embody. (”Maybe one day he’ll do something to merit all this attention,” Michelle Obama dryly told a reporter.)

“We have something very special here,” Obama’s top political aide Axelrod is quoted as saying. “I feel like I’ve been handed a porcelain baby.” Axelrod tells Obama — dubbed by his aides as the “Black Jesus” — that voters were looking for “a president who can bring the country together, who can reach beyond partisanship, and who’ll be tough on special interests.”

That was what we were promised. What we got instead is a president who increased the divisions in our nation, the most partisan and polarizing figure in the history of polling, one who is dogmatic and has been as generous to special interests as any we have seen. The efforts to buy votes in pursuit of the Obama agenda has added sewage to the cesspool.

This would hurt any president under any circumstances; for Barack Obama, whose allure was based almost entirely on his ability to convince the public that he embodied a “new politics,” it has been doubly damaging. It was Hillary Clinton of all people who understood Obama best when she said during the campaign, “We have to make people understand that he’s not real.”

Not real indeed. Obama’s stirring call for Americans to reject the “politics of cynicism” was itself deeply cynical. Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. After all, Heilemann and Halperin write, Axelrod was “a master of the dark arts of negative campaigning.” The first major profile of him, more than 20 years ago, was titled, “Hatchet Man: The Rise of David Axelrod.”

Obama and Axelrod might have been able to get away with this if Obama’s presidency had been viewed as successful and skilled. But it’s not. And when combined with the growing realization that Obama is not up to the task of governing, that he is pursuing policies that exacerbate our problems and takes us down a wrong and even perilous path, it is poison. The toxicity is such that what was once unthinkable now seems more likely than not: Democrats losing the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for almost half a century. And even if they don’t, 2010 is shaping up to be a perfectly awful year for Democrats. It’s a safe bet that in response they and their allies will lash out in rage, angry at the perceived injustice of it all, furious at the fate that has befallen them. They will blame Obama’s predecessor, Republicans in Congress, the conservative movement, angry white males, Fox News, Sarah Palin’s tweets, and the wrong alignment of the stars. It won’t work.

Having created a myth, they must now live with its unmasking.

Mr. Obama now has the highest disapproval rating in Gallup’s history for a president entering his second year in office. According to a new Washington Post–ABC News poll, among independents, only 49 percent approve — the lowest of any of his recent predecessors at this point in their presidencies. (Obama has lost a stunning 18 points among independents in just a year’s time.)

The U.S. canceled a $25 million federal contract for working in Afghanistan to a company owned by a Democratic campaign contributor that was awarded without entertaining competitive bids.

The U.S. has canceled a $25 million federal contract for work in Afghanistan awarded to a company owned by a Democratic campaign contributor without entertaining competitive bids.

The cancellation comes after Fox News first reported on the details of the contract last week, prompting lawmakers to make inquiries into the deal. State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley told Fox News that USAID terminated the award and is now working on an appropriate resolution.

The contract had been awarded on Jan. 4 to Checchi & Company Consulting, a Washington-based firm owned by economist and Democratic donor Vincent V. Checchi that was hired to provide "rule of law stabilization services" in war-torn Afghanistan.

A synopsis of the contract published on the USAID Web site said Checchi & Company would "train the next generation of legal professionals" throughout the Afghan provinces and thereby "develop the capacity of Afghanistan's justice system to be accessible, reliable, and fair."

The legality of the arrangement as a "sole source," or no-bid, contract was made possible by virtue of a waiver signed by the USAID administrator.

When Checchi was contacted by Fox News for its earlier report, he confirmed that his company had indeed received the nearly $25 million contract but declined to say why it had been awarded on a no-bid basis, referring a reporter to USAID.

Asked if he or his firm had been aware that the contract was awarded without competitive bids, Checchi replied: "After it was awarded to us, sure. Before, we had no idea."

Joseph A. Fredericks, director of public information at USAID, told Fox News the Checchi deal was actually a renewal of an existing contract, awarded in 2004 by the Bush administration after a competitive bid process.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Fox News the no-bid contract in this case "disturbed" him.

Issa had written to USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah requesting that the agency "produce all documents related to the Checchi contract" on or before Feb. 5. Citing the waiver that enabled USAID to award the contract on a no-bid basis, Issa noted that the exemption was intended to speed up the provision of services in a crisis environment.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, told Fox News she, too, was seeking answers about the Checchi contract.

As a candidate for president in 2008, Obama, then a senator, frequently derided the Bush administration for the awarding of federal contracts without competitive bidding.

Less than two months after he was sworn into office, President Obama signed a memorandum that he claimed would "dramatically reform the way we do business on contracts across the entire government."

Federal campaign records show Checchi has been a frequent contributor to liberal and Democratic causes and candidates in recent years, including to Obama's presidential campaign. The records show Checchi has given at least $4,400 to Obama dating back to March 2007, close to the maximum amount allowed.

he recent awarding of a lucrative federal contract to a company owned by a financial contributor to the Obama presidential campaign -- without competitive bidding -- "violated" President Obama's many campaign pledges to crack down on the practice, a top State Department official told Fox News.

Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley, familiar to many Americans from his erudite delivery of the State Department's daily press briefings, made the admission in a telephone interview Saturday night.

Reminded of Obama's many pledges during the 2008 campaign to crack down on the use of no-bid contracts, and of the memorandum the president signed last March instructing the Office of Management and Budget to curb the practice, Crowley said: "You make a valid point. If you want to say this violates the basis on which this administration came into office and campaigned, fair enough."

KBR Inc. was selected for a no-bid contract worth as much as $568 million through 2011 for military support services in Iraq, the Army said.

The Army announced its decision yesterday only hours after the Justice Department said it will pursue a lawsuit accusing the Houston-based company of taking kickbacks from two subcontractors on Iraq-related work. The Army also awarded the work to KBR over objections from members of Congress, who have pushed the Pentagon to seek bids for further logistics contracts.

Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance — and fining them if they don't — isn't the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic bills to revamp the nation's health care system doesn't quibble. Both the House bill and the Senate Finance Committee proposal clearly state that the fines would be a tax.

Here is video of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on with Greta Van Susteren last night, where she said she is disappointed that President Obama has not kep his word to her about making it clear their position on the Arizona anti-Illegal Immigration Law. Instead, Brewer heard yesterday that the Obama Justice Department is going to challenge the Arizona Law in the courts through an interview given by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Brewer also said she is “disappointed” that President Obama did not keep his word in promising to send officials to Arizona within two weeks to let her know how many troops will be sent to help secure the U.S. Border with Mexico. Obama had made that promise when he met with Brewer at the White House two weeks ago.

Brewer said “we will meet them in court, and we will win.”

After a while, all presidents get boring. It's the nature of the job. You go out there once, twice or three times a day to deliver a message that rarely changes, in a language that is so massaged by focus groups and polling that it inspires about as much as an algebraic equation. There are good reasons for this. Repetition works in politics. Most people aren't paying attention anyway. One step off message can ruin weeks of consistency.

But what happens when the boring president is still trying to be inspiring? I ask because today Organizing for America released "An Update for the President On The BP Oil Spill," a YouTube message from the president to the activists that Democrats hope will defy expectations this fall, turn out in big numbers, and help Obama keep his allies in the House and Senate leaderships. This is a message to the political troops, a rallying cry, an appeal, and it is about as exciting as mud-caked sandpaper. All the Obama typical cliches are here: "make no mistake," "we will do whatever is necessary," "seize this moment," "I'm asking you to stand with me today," "together we can make it happen," "rebuild our economy on a new foundation," and he does the pointing with his thumb thing. Pretty much everything he says here he has said somewhere else, and with more feeling.


As presidential rhetoric, this is perfectly passable stuff. Presidents are boring. People get that. But as political organizing rhetoric, this stuff seems deadly to me. What exactly should the Obama activists be excited about? What does it mean, exactly, to "rebuild our economy on a new foundation"? Does that mean Obama is pushing for a tax on carbon? For a strong cap and trade system? (Not clear, doubtful.) What special interests does he want to take on? None of this is clear. Instead of specifics, Obama provides platitudes. Again, that is standard stuff for a president. But thin gruel for an activist base--both because the rhetoric is dry and the details mostly lacking.

Back during the 2008 campaign, Obama found a way to keep his rhetoric fresh and interesting. Of course, his speeches then were mostly platitudes as well, but there was a measure of intellectual engagement in them, an energy, a promise, which really did get voters excited. Watch that video above one more time; it's striking how far Obama has come.

All you liberals who called Bush a "war criminal" over Gitmo when do you start calling for Obama's impeachment/trial at the Hague?