Crimes Against Liberty (11 page)

CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

PolitiFact
called Obama out on his boast that “the vast majority of the money I got was from small donors all across the country.” It reported that the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute found that though Obama raised more than his opponents from small donors, that money did not constitute the majority of the funds he raised. In the primary, he received 30 percent of his money from those who gave $200 or less, 28 percent from those giving between $201 and $999, and 43 percent from those contributing at least $1,000. In the general election, 34 percent of his funds came from small donors ($200 or less), 23 percent from those giving between $201 and $999, and 42 percent gave $1,000 or more. While Obama claims he won the presidency without much money from large donors, the evidence shows otherwise. Overall, said
PolitiFact
, Obama’s statement was “false.”
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CONVOKING COMMISSIONS

During the campaign, Obama attacked Senator McCain for proposing a commission to study the economic crisis, calling it an effort to “pass the buck.” “We know how we got into this mess,” Obama declared, asserting he could provide the “leadership” we need to get out of it. Obama had a point—except in 2010, President Obama formed, among other bodies, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—the exact kind of board he’d blasted McCain for advocating.
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ENDING NO-BID CONTRACTS

Candidate Obama said in Grand Rapids on October 2, 2008, “I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all. The days of sweetheart deals for Halliburton and the like will be over when I’m in the White House.” Early in his first term he signed a memo pledging to “dramatically reform the way we do business on contracts across the entire government.” He promised to “end unnecessary no-bid and cost-plus contracts.... In some cases, contracts are awarded without competition.... And that’s unacceptable.”

But less than a year later, his administration awarded a $25 million no-bid federal contract for work in Afghanistan to Checchi & Company, a firm owned by a major donor to Democratic campaigns. Unlike some of the no-bid scenarios for which Obama and other demagogic leftists condemned President Bush, Checchi & Company, according to FOX News’ sources, was “but one of a number of private firms capable of performing the work in Afghanistan for which USAID retained it.”
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In fact, Assistant Secretary of State P. J. Crowley, when questioned by FOX News about this no-bid award in light of Obama’s campaign pledge, admitted, “You make a valid point. If you want to say this violates the basis on which this administration came into office and campaigned, fair enough.” Amidst public criticism, the contract was eventually terminated .
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EARMARKS

In Green Bay, Wisconsin, candidate Obama declared, “The truth is our earmark system... is fraught with abuse. It badly needs reform—which is why I didn’t request a single earmark last year, why I’ve released all my previous requests for the public to see, why I’ve pledged to slash earmarks by more than half when I am president of the United States.” He said he would return earmarks to “less than $7.8 billion a year, the level they were before 1994.” Yet once in office, he quickly broke this promise—apart from his $800 billion “stimulus” bill, which could be said to be one gigantic package of earmarks.

Although the $410 billion omnibus spending bill had more than 8,500 earmarks, Obama didn’t blink before signing it. When questioned about his hypocrisy, Obama and his administration were typically disingenuous and dismissive. OMB Director Peter Orszag said, “We want to just move on. Let’s get this bill done. Get it into law and move forward.” In other words,
We have more important things to focus on than keeping our silly campaign promises. There’s nothing to see here; move on.
Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, passed it off as a kept promise because Obama had already passed the “major economic recovery act” and the “children’s healthcare bill,” which he said were both “earmark free.” Both Emanuel and Orszag declared, “This is last year’s business.”
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That is, it’s Bush’s fault.

Taxpayers for Common Sense reported that for the fiscal year 2010, appropriations bills contained 9,499 congressional earmarks worth $15.9 billion, up from $15.6 billion the previous year. Thus, Obama has not only failed to slash earmarks in half or to the 1994 level of $7.8 billion, but on his watch they’ve actually increased.
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LOBBYISTS

President Obama said in January 2010, “We must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve. That’s what I came to Washington to do. That’s why—for the first time in history—my Administration posts our White House visitors online. And that’s why we’ve excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.”

Yet his words had a remarkably short shelf life. Upon taking office, Obama signed the Executive Order on Ethics Commitments, which prohibited lobbyists from working in his administration for two years on issues for which they had lobbied. But he repeatedly exempted people from the rule. He granted a waiver for Defense Secretary Bill Lynn just two days after he signed the Executive Order, and later exempted Jocelyn Frye and Cecelia Muñoz as well.
PolitiFact
reported that in all, as of January 27, 2010, the White House had issued seven waivers to its ethics rules, which apply to lobbyists and to people who served as officers and directors of a company or organization, while executive branch agencies have issued an additional fifteen waivers.
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Always ready with an excuse, the administration claimed Frye and Muñoz were appointed “because of the importance of their respective positions and because of each woman’s unequaled qualifications for her job.”
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Of course, that could be said of nearly every lobbyist-appointee; by definition they have expertise in the area in which they lobbied.

Obama’s broken pledge to curtail the influence of lobbyists is perhaps best exposed through a mere partial list of former lobbyists serving in his administration. The list includes: Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn (lobbyist for Defense Contractor Raytheon); Attorney General Eric Holder (clients included Global Crossing); Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (lobbied for the National Education Association); Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary William Corr (lobbied for Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids); Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes (clients included San Diego Gas & Electric); Mark Patterson, Timothy Geithner’s chief of staff (lobbied for Goldman Sachs); Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain (clients included the Coalition for Asbestos Resolution, U.S. Airways, and Airborne Express); Mona Sutphen, deputy White House chief of staff (clients included Angliss International in 2003); Melody Barnes, domestic policy council director (lobbied for liberal advocacy groups); Cecilia Muñoz, White House director of intergovernmental affairs (lobbied for Hispanic advocacy organization the National Council of La Raza); and Patrick Gaspard, White House political affairs director (lobbyist for the Service Employees International Union).
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BUDGET ACCOUNTING GIMMICKS

Obama promised to end budgetary accounting gimmicks used by his whipping boy predecessor, George W. Bush, yet ObamaCare was defined by egregious budgetary gimmicks. As Pete Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, noted, in Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress he claimed to have identified $2 trillion in “savings,” but $1.6 trillion of those were based on the Iraq surge continuing for ten more years, even though Obama had promised to promptly discontinue the surge.
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Even
New York Times
Obamacon David Brooks acknowledged ObamaCare was “stuffed. . . . with gimmicks and dodges designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but don’t genuinely control runaway spending.”
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THE FREE MARKET

In an interview with
Bloomberg Business Week
, Obama called himself a “fierce advocate” of the free market. “You would be hard pressed,” he said, “to identify a piece of legislation that we have proposed out there that, net, is not good for businesses.”
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In a speech in New York City on April 22, 2010, while stumping for his financial reform bill, Obama averred, “As I said two years ago on this stage, I believe in the power of the free market.”

It’s noteworthy that no other president has felt the need to repeatedly make that point. Does he protest too much? Well, in New York, he couldn’t even wait a full paragraph to qualify his statement. He added, “But a free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.”
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Whoever said it was? And what system of laws ever permitted such a thing by the private sector? One wonders why we don’t hear Obama apply the same qualifier to the power of the federal government; could he bring himself to say, “But the federal government was never supposed to have a license to take whatever it can get, however it can get it”?

In fact, as Obama continually protested that he loved capitalism, he was doing everything in his power to permanently dismantle much of it in the United States, from his auto takeover, to ObamaCare, to cap and trade, to the financial overhaul bill.

Along the same lines, Obama said he wanted to “disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector.” In that case, perhaps he regrets having taken over GM and Chrysler, firing its CEOs and its board of directors, intervening by force in the mortgage business, interfering with existing private contracts, subsuming one-sixth of the economy with ObamaCare, trying to saddle businesses with stifling cap and trade laws, preventing TARP companies from paying their loans back, setting executive compensation, demonizing the insurance industry and Big Pharma, and paving the way for the abolition of private health insurers.

FISCAL HAWK

With a straight face, Obama characterizes himself as a fiscal hawk, vowing to usher in a “new era of responsibility,” to rise above petty politics, and to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term—all while submitting bankrupting ten-year budgets. He says he wants to steer America “from an era of borrow and spend” to one of “save and invest.” The CBO, meanwhile, reported that the national debt would double in six years under Obama and triple in ten years.

READ MY LIPS—SORT OF

During the campaign, Obama said, “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”
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But just weeks into his presidency, Obama violated his pledge by signing a law to triple the federal excise tax on cigarettes, from 39 cents to $1.01 per pack--a tax that would fall hardest on individuals and families making far less than $250,000 per year.
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When questioned about this, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs flippantly responded, “People make a decision to smoke.”

Later, when asked whether Obama’s tax pledge applied to his healthcare plan, Gibbs replied, “The statement didn’t come with caveats.” But smoking was precisely such a caveat, and healthcare quickly became another one. Obama brazenly denied an excise tax on the uninsured—which was part of a healthcare reform proposal drafted by his Democratic ally, Montana senator Max Baucus—would violate his pledge. In fact, he was visibly irritated when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos invoked a dictionary definition of “tax” to contradict him, shooting back, “I absolutely reject that notion.” At many other times, Obama’s various spokespersons refused to answer the question, employing evasions like, “We’re going to do what’s necessary,” “It is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out, no matter what,” and “We’re going to let the process work its way through.”
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Obama himself has tried to weasel out of his “firm pledge,” saying on February 9, 2010, in an interview in the Oval Office, that he was “agnostic” on whether his budget commission should consider raising taxes as a deficit-fighting measure. “The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table. So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”
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Continuing to meander all over the board, he said on April 10, 2010, that his pledge, which he made in the campaign and vacillated into agnosticism in February, now only applied to income taxes. “And one thing we have not done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000. That’s another promise we’ve kept.”
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In fact, he did not keep that promise because that was not the promise he made. His new focus solely on income taxes was an implicit acknowledgement that his tax hike on cigarettes had already broken his actual promise not to raise “any of your taxes.”