"Let your yes be yes"

At the very end of the presidential campaign Obama “proposed a $175 billion plan with tax-rebate checks for consumers as well as spending on school repairs, roads and bridges, aid to states, and tax credits for job creation.”

The current bill is not only spending 4.7 times what he promised in November, but gone are the tax-rebate checks and tax credits for job creation. The new additional programs have nothing to do with roads and bridges. Yet, a package that Obama never hinted at a couple of months ago is now considered sacrosanct. The Associated Press described Obama’s position on the stimulus plan this way: “Stopping just short of a take-it-or-leave-it stand, Obama has mocked the notion that a stimulus bill shouldn’t include huge spending.”

Take an emphatic promise that Obama made just a month ago, well after the heat of the presidential campaign had passed: “We are going to ban all earmarks — the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review.” That wasn’t a new promise. During the third presidential debate on October 15, 2008 Obama bluntly promised: “they need to be eliminated.”

But now take Obama’s testy defense of those same earmarks last Friday. Obama reportedly “also defended earmarks as inevitable in such a package.”

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