Top White House aide David Axelrod told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos today that the administration intends to explore a number of means by which it can overhaul the nation’s health care system, but refused to reaffirm then-candidate Barack Obama’s “firm pledge” to not raise taxes on middle class Americans.

“The president had said in the past that he does not believe taxing health care benefits at any level is necessarily the best way to go here,” said Axelrod. “He still believes that, but there are a number of formulations and we’ll wait and see.”

Obama has not always been open to “a number of formulations,” however. In fact, prompted by Republican accusations his tax plan would hurt middle class pocketbooks, Obama was quite adamant he would do no such thing. While campaigning in Dover, NH, Obama said, “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.”

Slow to fulfill campaign pledges or entirely reversing his position on others, the president has come under fire from the most loyal of Democratic Party activists, including the LGBT community and environmentalists, but waffling on his no-middle-class-tax-hike pledge stands to pit the irresolute president against a majority of the American voting public, not just disillusioned splinter groups.

After pressed on whether the president will draw “a line in the sand” by a persistent Stephanopoulos, Axelrod refused to take the bait and align the administration with any such ultimatum.

“One of the problems we’ve had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don’t get anything done. That’s not the way the president approaches this,” he said.

The reason for President Obama’s now-obvious reticence to pursue campaign pledges—or make intractable ultimatums, for that matter—is quite simple. Keeping promises while juggling the competing interests of donors, activists, and voters is no simple feat. If you don’t make a promise, you can’t break it.

Then-candidate Barack Obama promised impossibilities—of a transparent government, of a new politics, of a hopeful and peaceful American—and performed little. Now-President Barack Obama promises nothing and yet he still performs little.

Color me surprised.

Cross-posted at Skepticians.com.

Follow James Richardson on Twitter.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced Friday it will launch a series of district-specific radio ads targeting vulnerable Republicans who voted against President Obama’s controversial war supplemental package.

As a matter of national security in years past Republicans have shown tremendous support for similar measures, however last week they voted en bloc against the $106 billion appropriations bill.

The Democratic Leadership and the DCCC would be content to let the public believe Republicans were “playing politics” with the troops, having voted against the emergency legislation out of pure spite for the president.

Over 100 Republicans voted for the bill when the first iteration—before the $83.5 billion bill mushroomed—reached the floor of the House several weeks ago. But after the Democratic Leadership rewrote the bill to include billions in funding for lawmakers’ pet projects, including an additional $5 billion in funding for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), virtually all Republicans defected, accusing the Democrats of lacing the emergency war-funding bill with billions of extraneous pork barrel spending.

If a global bailout is to be to debated and funded, it surely does not belong in a war appropriations bill. Democrats know this, just like they knew bailout-averse Republicans would, instinctively, vote against any such measure. And then they realized they had the upper-hand, they held the coveted “you’re-playing-politics-with-the-troops” card.

Read More →

Former U.S. Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) announced Monday, via YouTube, he intends to challenge Governor Charlie Crist and former Florida House of Representatives Speaker Marco Rubio in the Republican primary for Florida’s vacant Senate seat in 2010.

Echoing Rubio’s conservative sentiments, the Florida snowbird said his entry into the already-crowded primary was precipitated by the Republican Party establishment’s unacceptable lurch to the left. “I can’t stand by and watch what is happening to our country – and our Party,” Smith said in his online address.

Smith’s new-found moral compass and concern for the direction of his country and of the Republican Party is awfully amusing, of course, given his opportunistic and decidedly vindictive nature.

After mounting a comically unsuccessful independent bid for President in 2000, Smith lost a bitter primary battle to then-Congressman John Sununu two years and two parties later. But unfortunately Smith’s presence on the national scene didn’t end with his ousting.

Hoping he might reemerge as a key political player, ostensibly as a Democrat after having sampled all competing parties, Smith endorsed Senator John Kerry in his ill-fated campaign for President in 2004, citing Kerry’s “courage and character” forged on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Read More →

A review of Minnesota’s statewide database of registered voters revealed at least 2,812 deceased individuals voted in last November’s general election, according to a new report by the “traditional values” advocacy group Minnesota Majority.

After obtaining the list of voters who participated in November’s election, the group hired an independent firm who specializes in “death suppression” for direct mailing lists to review the data. The process, which involved matching names and addresses to state death records, bore troubling results.

According to Minnesota statute 201.13, the commissioner of health is to report monthly the name, address, date of birth, and county of residence of voting-age deceased residents to the secretary of state.

Presumably the commissioner of health would not issue incomplete reports (read: no motive), the blame then falls elsewhere – namely, at the feet of Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, whose partisan leanings and curious alliance with vote fraud-magnet ACORN are becoming more salient by the day.

Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann argues the discrepancies unearthed by the group are merely the result of election workers updating the voter database with faulty information and were not instance of voter fraud.

“I would venture—put my reputation on—the fact that there are very few, if any, people impersonating dead people. You’re going to have human error,” he admitted.

But Jeff Davis, president of Minnesota Majority, believes the situation to be far less benign – and legal – than the Ritchie’s staff is willing to admit.

Read More →