Oswaldo Hernández-Hernández | Staff Writer
hernane5@imail.losrios.edu
President Barack Obama should start worrying about his approval rating, especially if he’s planning to run for a second term.
“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours,” he said many times throughout his presidential campaign.
Now that he is president, however, he’s still asking us to do the same thing – believe – because he hasn’t delivered anything to us.
According to the Daily Presidential Tracking Poll by Rasmussen Reports, as of Sept. 1 41 percent of U.S. citizens strongly disapprove President Obama’s performance so far.
Like many presidents, Obama won the office by promising to address our major concerns. But, according to politifact.com, of the 500 promises that he made on his campaign trail he’s already broken seven.
As a person of Hispanic descent, I feel that Obama has failed every Hispanic person who voted for him. He has been in office for roughly eight months now, and his primary concern is obviously our economy. When he was elected, though, the economy was already in shambles – and that didn’t stop him from promising to provide comprehensive immigration reform during his first year in office.
This immigration reform has now been postponed until next year, and Obama has approved additional personnel to secure the border against immigrants.
There are other groups Obama has broken promises to, including low-income seniors to whom he promised the elimination of income taxes and businesses that were promised tax credits in exchange for the creation of new jobs.
Among the 36 promises politifact.com says he’s kept so far are the creation of a foreclosure prevention fund for homeowners, the expansion of loan programs for small businesses, and the expansion of funding to train primary care providers and public health practitioners.
No one expected miracles from our new president, but we also didn’t expect him to break so many promises so early.
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I’m not a big fan of Obama, but this reminds me of something my political science teacher, Paul Frank, said. He said that at every election, we expect more and more from our presidents, and candidates have to make bigger and bigger promises, when really they can’t realistically keep them all. But if someone didn’t make so many promises, and the other candidates did, we’d probably vote for the other candidates.
Still, Obama might not be keeping as many as he could, or might not be prioritizing well. What do you think?
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