Yesterday, a reader asked why I wasn’t listing the expiration dates of Obama’s statements as often as I used to. One is sheer volume, another is that sometimes they’re so widely noted it would be redundant (like the C-SPAN promise), and another is that I’m not sure there is anyone left who would argue seriously that Obama has done a good job of keeping his promises, or that any seemingly resolute statement from the president won’t be changed in the face of political pressure. The closest we could expect would be some variation of, “Yes, but he has kept the promises he meant to keep.”
But every once in a while, Obama is so blatant in his reversals, we have to break it out once more. I’m sure you remember this pledge, and how there were no hedges, no exceptions, no “maybes” in his promise on the campaign trail:
“No family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase.”
And now, the tune changes:
President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.
Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”