Views » June 5, 2009 » Web Only

Whither the Sacred Campaign Promise?

By David Sirota

Though not (yet) having children of my own, I often consider what my future offspring won’t know about and will find humorous. I fantasize that they will have no idea what gasoline-powered cars or private health insurance policies are. But I also worry they will guffaw in disbelief when I tell them politicians once knew that breaking campaign promises without explanation had consequences.

Historically, Americans generally held campaign promises sacred. We understood that republican democracy makes us rely on pledges of future action as the metric for choosing representatives; we knew that politicians reneging on pledges without adequate reason were desecrating that democracy; and we therefore often punished promise-breakers accordingly.

I’m not idealizing halcyon days that never were—just ask George H.W. Bush, who lost re-election in 1992 after trampling his “no new taxes” guarantee. Indeed, breaking campaign pledges was one of the surest ways for politicians to hurt themselves—until 2006.

That year’s highest-profile campaign was Connecticut’s U.S. Senate race between incumbent Joseph Lieberman and challenger Ned Lamont—a race signaling a tectonic shift.

Lieberman had broken two key promises: 1) He was violating an explicit term-limits pledge and 2) He vowed to “help end the war in Iraq” while working to continue it. And yet, he was re-elected without ever explaining his reversals.

I’d like to think that result was merely a symptom of momentary shellshock. Perhaps an electorate so numbed by Republicans’ then-recent attacks on John Kerry’s changing positions was temporarily unable to process discussions of “flip-flopping.”

But, then, behavior by President Obama suggests a more systemic assault on the campaign promise is underway.

It started in December when he was asked why he was making Hillary Clinton his chief diplomat after criticizing her qualifications and promising Democratic primary voters that his views on international relations were different than hers. He responded by telling the questioner “you’re having fun” trying “to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign.” The implicit assertion was that anyone expecting him to answer for campaign statements must just be “having fun”—and certainly can’t be serious.

A few months later, in reversing a 5-year-old commitment to support ending the Cuban embargo, Obama offered no rationale for the U-turn other than saying he was “running for Senate” at a time that “seems just eons ago”—again, as if everyone should know that previous campaign promises mean nothing.

At least that was a response. After the New York Times recently reported that “the administration has no present plans to reopen negotiations on NAFTA” as “Obama vowed to do during his campaign,” there was no explanation offered whatsoever. We were left to recall Obama previously telling Fortune magazine that his NAFTA promises were too “overheated and amplified” to be taken literally.

It’s true that politicians have always broken promises, but rarely so proudly and with such impunity.

We once respected democracy by at least demanding explanations—however weak—for unfulfilled promises. Then we became a country whose scorched-earth campaigns against flip-flopping desensitized us to reversals. Now, we don’t flinch when our president appears tickled that a few poor souls still expect politicians to fulfill promises and justify broken ones.

The worst part of this devolution is the centrality of Obama, the prophet of “hope” and “change” who once said that “cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom.” If that’s true, then he has become America’s wisest man—the guy who seems to know my kids will laugh when I tell them politicians and voters once believed in democracy and took campaign promises seriously.

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• Reader Comments

  I love reading Sirota’s stuff.  He is such an idiot.  With all due respect. 

  Quite apart from the historical joke concerning campaign promises, the election of a real live Marxist to the presidency has institutionalized dishonesty within the government.  Not that dishonesty hasn’t been a feature among Democrats for decades.

  Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson were men of integrity and were Democrat Party leaders.  But JFK and LBJ were monumental liars, and cost the Republic terribly. 

  JFK stole the 1960 presidential election by lying about the missile gap that he knew did not exist, plus his father bought and paid for the narrow win in Illinois, which gave JFK a narrow win in the election.  JFK damn near got us into a nuclear war with the Soviets, and did get us into the Vietnam War which the Democrats did not have the resolution to win nor the integrity to end. 

  LBJ was widely known as “Bullshit” Johnson in college, and stole his first senate election by stuffing ballot boxes.  Out of one-half million votes cast, LBJ won by 87 votes, with the late-arriving ballot boxes containing more votes than there were voters.  Then LBJ became known as “Landslide” Johnson.  LBJ initiated the several Great Society programs, including the War on Poverty.  WoP alone ended up costing $6.6 trillion, and collapsed in waste, fraud, and corruption.  The War on Poverty by itself still accounts for over one-half the national debt, even after Obama’s furious efforts to increase the deficit. 

  Then there were the dishonest character assassinations of Republican court nominees, including Bork and Estrada. 

  In the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, every Democratic and Republican senator and almost 90% of the House voted that Saddam had WMD, and we have the horrific pictures of the dead at Halabja showing the results of poison gas on Kurdish women and children.  But when it became politically convenient, every Democratic senator except Joe Lieberman said that there were no WMD, and President Bush invented the WMD to justify the Iraq War. 

  Ninety-nine senators voted for the Patriot Act which included provisions (FISA) to wiretap foreign terrorist suspects, and then many of these same Democratic senators insisted that President Bush, in using these wiretap provisions, was violating the law that the Democrats had voted for.  During the campaign, Obama loudly proclaimed that President Bush had violated the law regarding wiretaps on terrorists, and that he would vote against the revised law.  But when the time came, Obama quietly voted for the revised FISA law, and has since put it to use.

  Posted by scorp on Jun 6, 2009 at 7:34 PM

  (Continued)

  The Constitution of the United States of America presupposes a moral order.  Violation of that moral order is a sin and/or crime, and is an act of hypocrisy.  But Marxism rejects the Western Judeo-Christian moral order, on the grounds that the bourgeois moral order was a tool for repression of workers.  Marxism embraces a “moral order” predicated on the success of Marxism, whereby any sin, crime, dishonesty, or hypocrisy in pursuit of Marxist goals is the highest form of “virtue.” 

  But workers, as a class, reject Marxism.  There has never been a Marxist revolution led by workers.  So-called Marxist revolutions are led by elites; lawyers, journalists, and warlords predominate, but Stalin studied for the priesthood before becoming a bank robber. 

  There have been mercifully few such blatantly misguided, hypocritical philosophical systems.  The Thugees of India practiced ritual murder as an act of worship before they were suppressed.  Islam endorses dishonesty to further Islamic goals.  And Marxists have similarly adopted dishonesty, fraud, theft, and genocide in pursuit of their goals.  Philosophically, that is about the extent of defense of evil. 

  Islamic terrorists and Marxists have formed an ad hoc alliance against American Constitutional values, not unlike Hitler and Stalin.  Hitler and Stalin were philosophical enemies, but each needed to protect his flank while they each made their own plans for world conquest.  So, the current Marxist/Islamist alliance. 

  Now, what is Sirota’s real problem?  He obviously doesn’t mind if Democrats lie to Republicans and to the American people.  Did his horse lose in the presidential race?  That would explain his comments on Hillary.  Or does he think Obama is not doing sufficient damage to the American economy?  That would explain his comments on NAFTA.

  LBJ mismanaged the economy and gave us Reagan, who cleaned up LBJ’s mess.  Clinton mismanaged the dot.com bubble and gave us Bush, who cleaned up Clinton’s mess.  The Democrats gave us the mortgage fiasco and now they have given us Obama, which will be a world class disaster rivaling the Soviet Union calamities.  Don’t worry, we will clean up your mess again, but you could help by not acting so stupidly.

  Posted by scorp on Jun 6, 2009 at 7:36 PM

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