Promises, Promises

Politicians are well known for making and breaking campaign promises. And the voters are well known for forgetting the promises come next election.

The good folks at PolitiFact (courtesy the St. Petersburg times, a newspaper I read for many years in Florida and did a pretty good job of rating the campaing commercials and attacks) have introduced the Obameter, a site to track his campaign promises. They are rating them as kept, broken, compromised, stalled, or no action. There is a complete list of 509 promises they have found during the campaign to track.

So far, five have been kept, mostly easy ones of course like naming at least one Republican to his Cabinet. 14 are in the works, one compromise and one stalled.

It will be interesting to see how these develop. Some may take longer than two terms and still be hard to quantify like "Restore the Great Lakes". Some seem almost too easy such as "Provide the CDC $50 million in new funding to determine the most effective approaches for cancer patient care" ($50 million isn't much in a $3 trillion budget).

Obama said to hold him accountable...this is a good first step and I look forward to seeing what progress is made on these.