Wednesday, January 06, 2010

The C-Span Promise



Here you see/hear Obama promising on eight different occasions to put the health bill negotiations on C-Span(clip from Drudge). As everyone knows, he is at the very moment violating this promise in a particularly in-your-face way, despite the fact C-Span itself has promised to make it very easy to keep it if he would only agree to do so. The House and Senate bills are being combined in a meeting that not only is not public, its proceedings are actually being kept secret from other members of Congress.

I think it is rather obvious what happened. When he made this promise he thought his reforms would be popular, and public view would shame (a word he used at the time) the legislators into doing what he wanted. But then as the discussion about the measure proceeded and public approval for the measure sank lower and lower the more we learned about it, it became clear that shame would work in the opposite direction from the one he intended. Obama had to chose between the bill and his naive, amateurish promise of democratic transparency. He chose the bill.

2 comments:

talkingtj said...

honestly, iam more troubled by everything than ever before, i dont know where we are heading, the assumption that we voted obama in to be our savior is nonsense, the blame for the current mess we are in rests equally with the american public who just dont learn. buy a house- no money down-are you kidding me?-more tax breaks for the wealthy while the middle class evaporates-yes please-stand idly by passing useless legislation on top useless legislation while our enemiess amass against us-sure why not!-keep borrowing money from countries hostile to us, and use it to bail out gigantic corporations that betray the american public at every conceivable turn-you betcha! obama has my sympathies, and i would like to extend them from another country.

Anonymous said...

In the 60's when America was a self sustaining industrial economy they used to say, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country". Nowadays it's; "What's good for the derivative funds is good for the reelection of our politicians". Uncle Sam's face has been replaced by Alfred E Newman's.