If I Had Voted for Obama, I'd Be Pissed!

I didn't vote for Obama, so Obama supporters may discount the opinions in this blog post, but if I had voted for Obama, I'd be pissed. He made a number of very specific and emphatic campaign promises, and he routinely denounced some specific actions of the Bush administrations. To date, many of the most important of those promises have been either conveniently forgotten or outright reversed. Some of his promises include:

• Closing the prison camp Guantanimo
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• Giving 95% of all Americans a tax cut
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• Halting torture of prisoners
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• Eliminating warrantless wiretapping
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• Removing combat troops from Iraq within 18 months
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• Posting the text of all new laws on web 48 hours before they were voted on
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• Eliminating the influence of lobbyists in the federal government
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• Increasing the transparency of government decisions
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• Working in a post-partisan manner
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• Leading a post-racial society
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These are things that are very important to almost all left-leaning Americans, but of course, are also important to most centrists and many conservatives. So how did he do? Did Obama keep his promises? Is he still outraged by the actions of the Bush administration enough to have reversed policy and ameliorated those actions?

Here's my take on these promises:

• He's "studying" closing Guantanimo, and apparently having trouble finding alternate holding locations for the current inmates. I'll bet anybody $10 that Guantanimo holds at least 25 prisoners (who have not been convicted of any crime) by the time Obama's first term ends. Obama has also announced that he reserves the right to hold enemy combatants indefinitely, even after they've served their sentences. Dick Cheney would be proud of his resolve.
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• Obama has moved aggressively on legislation that will generally raise taxes, but has not, to my knowledge, done anything about a general tax reduction for 95% of Americans.
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• He's banned torture via executive order, although I am unclear whether that means waterboarding has ceased to be an option during interrogations.
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• Warrantless wiretapping continues. The Obama administration has vigorously defended in court the administration's right to continue monitoring overseas communications, in direct continuation of the Bush administration's policies.
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• Combat troops are coming home from Iraq, but at the exact pace established by the Bush administration in cooperation with the Iraqi government in 2008.
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• Many high-profile laws have been voted on without even giving the legislatures enough time to read them (the "Stimulus" and the House "Cap & Trade" bills). Neither of these bills was posted on the web prior to being voted on.
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• Obama has lobbyists in the cabinet, and had wanted to appoint others (such as Tom Daschle). Apparently, some lobbyists are just too darn vital to the national service to allow this restriction to apply to them.
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• Transparency is hard to measure, but the statement of Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel to "never let a crisis go to waste" tends to indicate to this commentator that transparency of decision making is not a high priority in the White House.
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• Several key pieces of legislature that Obama has worked hard to enact were enacted with essentially zero Republican votes or consultation. One could always argue that bi-partisanship is a two-way street that requires both parties to cooperate, but this observer saw no evidence that Obama had any interest in the minority party's views on the legislation.
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• Obama's friend, Professor Skip Gates, had a run-in with a policeman who suspected he might be a burglar. Despite admitting ignorance of the facts, Obama immediately opined that the policeman acted stupidly, and implied that racial prejudice by the white policeman was the likely cause of the problem. In other words, Obama's raised race as the dominant issue without any supporting data, thereby emphasizing the different races of the participants. This is not, in this reviewer's opinion, how a "post-racial" president approaches events.
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So as a conservative, I'm glad that Obama's not keeping his promises, but if I were a left-of-center voter, I'd be really pissed at him.