Scott Spiegel

In celebration of Obama’s first 100 days in office, PolitiFact.com published a series, “The Obameter: Tracking Obama’s Campaign Promises.”  The site compiles 514 promises Obama made during the campaign and tracks his daily progress in fulfilling them.  PolitiFact assigns each promise one of the following outcomes: Kept, Compromise, Broken, Stalled, In the Works, No Action, and Yes We Can (just kidding on that last one).  They also identify his “Top 25” most important promises.

This seems like such an even-handed, nonpartisan way to evaluate Obama, one we can all agree on.  Indeed, as of Day 96, PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times-housed, Pulitzer Prize-winning site, lists only 5% of Obama’s promises as Kept, 12% as In the Works, and 79% as No Action.

It’s interesting, however, that for PolitiFact, the baseline for success is whether Obama keeps his promises.  The assumption is that his promises are worth keeping.  As Obama said, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

A better way to track Obama’s performance might be to first classify his threats—er, promises—into three categories: Harmful, Inoffensive, and Worthy.  By this system, I determine that 15 out of 25, or 60%, of Obama’s Top 25 promises are Harmful, 24% are Inoffensive, and 16% are Worthy.  Off to a great start!

Second, let’s give Obama 1 point for every Worthy promise he’s kept, a ½ point for every one that’s compromised, stalled, or in the works, and 0 points for every one that’s broken or not acted on.  Give him 0 points for every Harmful promise, no matter what stage it’s in, except let’s give him a ½ point for every Harmful promise he’s broken, because he might just have been appeasing his base during the campaign (though he still loses credit for scaring us).  Inoffensive promises get no points.

And now, PolitiFact’s Top 25 Obama Promises, deconstructed and scored by me:

1. Create a foreclosure prevention fund for homeowners; or, “Pour $10 billion over Niagara Falls.”  Harmful/Kept: 0.

2. Create a tax credit of $500 for workers. If he had made it $500,000, he might have captured my interest.  Inoffensive/Compromise: 0.

3. Repeal the Bush tax cuts for higher incomes; or, “Decrease incentives to work and engage in entrepreneurship; increase income non-reporting and tax loophole exploitation.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

4. Create a National Health Insurance Exchange. I’m allergic to any campaign promise with that many capital letters.  Harmful/No Action: 0.

5. Require children to have health insurance coverage; or, “Drive up the costs of health insurance and provide cover for the government to step in and start rationing.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

6. Invest in electronic health information systems; or, “Do what hospitals and clinics are already doing, but less efficiently and at greater cost.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

7. Fully fund the Veterans Administration. Gee, this doesn’t have anything to do with rubbing it in Bush’s face over those rats they found in the VA a couple of years ago, does it?  Worthy/No Action: 0.

8. Begin removing combat brigades from Iraq; or, “See if we can lose the war just as we’re crossing the finish line.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

9. Send two additional brigades to Afghanistan. Worthy/Kept: 1.

10. End the use of torture. First, we don’t torture.  So Obama’s promise is to stop splashing water on Muslim terrorists, which means they’ll no longer be bathing daily.  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

11. Close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. This was never actually fulfillable, because there is no sane option for what to do with the detainees that would be acceptable to anyone but the ACLU.  Harmful/In the Works (supposedly): 0.

12. End warrantless wiretaps; or, “Shoot ourselves in the collective eardrum.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

13. Seek verifiable reductions in nuclear stockpiles. Any state we don’t trust will, by definition, not negotiate with us to reduce their stockpiles or halt actions to develop nuclear weapons.  Harmful/No Action: 0.

14. Centralize ethics and lobbying information for voters. Sort of like the database Obama created to document contributions made by supporters, in order to ensure foreign nationals were not making donations—oh, wait…  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

15. Require more disclosure and a waiting period for earmarks. Earmarks make up but an infinitesimal fraction of government spending.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

16. Tougher rules against revolving door for lobbyists and former officials. Worthy/Broken: 0.

17. Secure the borders.  Obama will support “additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.” This is too vague to mean anything one way or the other.  Inoffensive/In the Works: 0.

18. Provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Lovely, but this isn’t anywhere near the Top 25 issues we face.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

19. Reform mandatory minimum sentences. A real liberal would have the guts to talk about decriminalizing drug use, as some libertarian Republicans have.  Worthy/No Action: 0.

20. Secure nuclear weapons materials in four years. See “reduction in stockpiles.”  Any country that would comply is not a threat.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

21. Strengthen antitrust enforcement; or, “Stop the next Microsoft before it floods the market with inexpensive technological advancements that make everyone’s life better.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

22. Create new financial regulations; or, “Make sure every new American company sets up shop in London, Hong Kong, or Singapore.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

23. Create 5 million “green” jobs; or, “Be ready to fight the next round of global cooling after the current round of global warming is over.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

24. Reduce oil consumption by 35 percent by 2030; or, “Encourage caveman chic.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

25. Create cap and trade system with interim goals to reduce global warming; or, “Make Al Gore give up 80% of his SUV fleet by the time his grandchildren are old enough to drive.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

Total score: 1 point out of a maximum of 25, or 4%.  Congratulations, Obama!  I believe that is what’s known in high school as an “F minus minus minus.”

Obama didn’t even get any half-points for breaking any of his harmful promises.  And here, under my system, he could have scored a 30% just by abandoning every one of his rotten ideas.

The New York Times recently published an editorial titled “In the Spirit of Openness.” It begins, “When he was vice president, Dick Cheney never acknowledged the public’s right to know anything. Now, suddenly, he has the full disclosure bug.”

How did Cheney catch this “full disclosure bug”? Could it in fact be an allergic reaction to some recent event or another—I don’t know, say, the Obama administration’s censorious partial disclosure of the enhanced interrogation memos with all of the spoilers blacked out?

The Times mocks Cheney’s statement that the decision to release the memos “inspired” him to ask the CIA to release full transcripts of the interrogations. Might “inspired” be a euphemism for “forced”?

The Times continues: “Mr. Cheney was not being entirely honest… and his logic is confounding. If releasing the memos leaves this country open to a devastating terrorist attack… imagine the potential harm from revealing all of the secrets gleaned from the three most ‘high value’ terrorists captured since Sept. 11, 2001.”

Let’s examine Cheney’s supposed breakdown in logic. Releasing the memos, which detail the nature and limits of the U.S.’s enhanced interrogation techniques, inarguably makes our country more vulnerable to attack, because it increases terrorists’ understanding of our methods and what is needed to resist them.

In contrast, Cheney’s suggestion of releasing the interrogation transcripts to show that these techniques worked reaffirms our commitment to using them, no matter what naysayers like Obama claim. Releasing the transcripts blunts critics’ self-destructive accusation that these techniques are too harsh to be used by our military, and must be exposed as scandalous; releasing the transcripts reveals a boob like Obama to be irrelevant. It is the equivalent of saying, “Don’t listen to that strange guy babbling in the corner—that’s just our crazy uncle talking to himself again.”

The Times insists that releasing the interrogation transcripts will disclose information about intercepted terrorist plots. So? Didn’t the terrorist networks planning these attacks already know about them, by definition? Hasn’t the Bush administration expounded in great detail on numerous foiled terrorist schemes, including novel methods terrorists have attempted, such as shoe bombing and assembling liquid explosives in-flight?

The terrorists are the ones who will be the least surprised by the transcripts. The people who will be most surprised are Americans who have been lulled into accepting the left’s diatribe about the techniques being “inexcusable,” “contrary to our values,” “against the American way of life,” etc. These voters are bound to change their minds once they learn precisely how successful those techniques have been at keeping them safe for the past seven-and-a-half years—which is why the Obama administration is keen on their not receiving this information.

What is especially galling is that Obama is the one feigning full disclosure, by releasing the interrogation memos, but having the Justice Department black out sections that show how the interrogation techniques worked. This would be like a newspaper’s editor-in-chief (1) preparing a company memo chronicling how a senior journalist violated newsroom standards by quoting an anonymous source, (2) blacking out the part of the report showing that the journalist corroborated the source’s information with other named, credible sources, and (3) claiming the journalist did not engage in “full disclosure.”

To the Obama administration, “full disclosure” apparently means “showing the parts that could be embarrassing for Bush and Cheney, and blotting out the rest with a Sharpie.”

Cheney originally preferred, justifiably, not to declassify the memos. He knew that doing so would reveal important information about our intelligence-gathering techniques, which the enemy could then better resist by understanding the limits and precautions incorporated in those techniques—e.g., “throwing” a detainee up against a “wall” made of rubber so as not to cause internal injuries, using a collar while doing so to prevent a detainee’s neck from being broken, employing a simulation of drowning that can be performed many times over a short period with no permanent harm. Once the Obama administration blew the lid off these memos, Cheney realized the only way to defend these techniques was to reveal how successful they had been in gathering intelligence.

The Times piece smarmily concludes, “We can’t imagine how such an investigation [of the interrogations] can move ahead without Mr. Cheney’s testimony. But given the former vice president’s new devotion to full disclosure, we’re sure he’ll be happy to comply.”

A thought experiment: Suppose the techniques had not been effective, or that their effectiveness had been debatable. Would Cheney now be chomping at the bit to have the interrogation transcripts released?

Suppose that the techniques had been effective. Would the Times still object to Bush and Cheney being able to use these transcripts to defend their actions, if releasing this evidence were the only way they could acquit themselves of spurious charges of violating the law?  (Of course The Times would, but bear with me.)  Given Cheney’s push for full disclosure of the transcripts, one can only assume the evidence will back him up, and that those who call his bluff will look like fools.

Openness for openness’ sake, no matter what the consequences for intelligence gathering and Americans’ safety, is suicidal. Openness for the sake of rebuilding the perception of our military as strong and unyielding, and disproving scurrilous accusations by ignorant politicians who fail to practice openness themselves, is eminently sensible.

There is confounding logic being thrown around here, but not by former Vice President Cheney.