A question about what the voters got compared with what they were promised.

This is just a question from a curious mind.

If i were to watch an advert for a product, say a kitchen cleaner. I'm totaly sold on the product as it's just what i need. Yet when i get it home, it's rubbish and does little of what it claims to do.

I could of course either get my money back or give trading standards a ring.

So how does it work in politics?

I'm only mentioning Obama here as it's all we've heard about recently, i'm sure many other politicians are guilty of this too.

If as people are saying, Obama promised lots of things which he is blatantly going against now, why can't anything be done about that?

Many people voted for him purely on what he promised. I know many were sick of Bush, but many literally hung on Obama's every word and this is exactly why he got the vote.

So if he lied to get into office, why can't that be investigated and sorted out?

There should be a trading standards for politicians, if it doesn't do what it says on the bottle.....they should bin it!

If any other company or business lied about the services it promised to offer, it would be closed down or at least punished and ordered to alter it's ways.

CX.

reply to post by CX


I agree, politicians should be held accountable for promises made just as a business is.

So we should be able to 'trade them back in' for a model that would work a little better? 'I think this thing is broken...it aint doin' nothin' like it said on the box.'

edit to fix the wrong reply button getting pressed...poltergeists..

[edit on 24-7-2009 by KSPigpen]

Let's see....Obama has been in office for 185 days now and people EXPECT him to have delivered on ALL of his promises made during his campaign. First off, no president EVER follows through on ALL promises, as they still have Congress to deal with as an obstacle. So this is still an "open ended book".

What can we say about Obama? We can say he has NOT taken a day of Vacation yet...unlike his Republican predecessors.

What is the vacation day tally for the last 3 presidents? Here is an approximate count...I say approximate, because I did not count them myself and also because I believe these #s I am providing were tallied before the end of Bush Jr. 1st TERM.

According to the Washington Post, as for August 2003 (with a year and a half remaining in his first term), the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, had been on vacation 250 days, approximately 27% of the time. That means every year he’s taken on average three months of vacation. Prior to September 11, 2001, George W. Bush was on vacation for 96 days -- Given that he’d taken office on January 20th of 2001, that means that as of September 11th, he’d been ‘on the job’ for 234 days. If 96 of those were vacation days, he was on vacation 41% of the time. However, compared to his father, George H. Bush, who was President for a single 4-year term, and took 543 (Five-hundred-fourty-three days of vacation!! That’s a year and a half!) W. is a workaholic! As for December 1999, Bill Clinton had spent 152 days on holiday during his two terms -- As a percentage, that’s approximately 5.2% of the time.

WOW!!! GB Jr. REALLY worked for America didn't he....Only wish I had that many vacation days per year!

Just my 2-cents

EDIT: to add that Bush Jr. spent 487 days vacation at Camp David and 490 days at his Crawford, TX ranch. That is 977 out of 2922 days in office... which is 33.4% of the time.

SOURCE: www.cbsnews.com...

[edit on 24-7-2009 by Aggie Man]

Campaign promise breaking is a cherished American tradition.

No one who has lived long enough to vote in an election should be so stupid as to expect that campaign promises will be kept, except in some abstract sense.

It's pretty easy to promise the moon, but actually delivering it is quite another thing altogether.

You know, you have to get the money out of Congress and then you have to train all those engineers and astronauts and then you have to get all that hardware into space and then you have to deal with that whole gravitational time-space thing.

It's hard.

I don't have much love for Obama's agenda and I think he really could have used a decade or so in politics to get all that protocol stuff down, so he could maybe "calibrate" his words more carefully, but I don't know how a president could heap any more on his presidential plate in such a short time as Obama has.

He's just not letting grass grow under his feet. He's managed to deliver apologies to at least half the globe for the mean ol' America he inherited and how he's going to fix it all.

He's going to win the war on terror without using all those baggage-laden terms like "victory." Perhaps, we shall overcome.

And let's not forget the nationalized health care initiative. He's not backing down from that, even if Congress is getting cold feet and the American people are beginning to sweat bullets thinking about who's going to pay the 23 trillion dollars that we'll be looking at if the thing passes.

Give the guy a break. It's hard.



[edit on 2009/7/24 by GradyPhilpott]

Uhhhh, ya, I voted for Obama, and I must admit, it was very much a referendum on the Bush Administration. All this Dark-National-Security-State stuff, was traumatizing me. I just could not take Republicans any more. I wanted to send them a message. No-the-less-and-none-the-hey, I --believed-- that Obama was anti War-Hawk, and would bring all troops home from every conflict area. Because I want my government to say, "I am not going to spend trillions on imperial regime-change adventures, I will spend it on the American people AT HOME." Because Afghanistan is our Soviet Union-versus-the Mujahadine waterloo, as well.
When one of Obama's first acts was to give trillions of dollars to those Too-Big-To-Fails who have demonstrated that they are untrustworthy and/or incompetent with money, or had to do with this Second Great Depression that we got in, well, my feeling disapointed is AN UNDERSTATEMENT.
THEN I discovered Alex Jones' internet radio show, and wished I would have been a Jones student before I voted.

reply to post by simonecharisse


Kind of makes You wish that You voted for Ron Paul huh? I found out about Alex Jones during the primaries when I started looking into Ron Paul. This election was so heavily scripted and it seemed like it was just a horse race to me. I really love how the main stream media colluded with the evil bankers in throwing this election their way once again. I'm sure this is going to be the last straw and the people will be waking up shortly when they are homeless and hungry.

For those who think this is an Obama bashing thread, please insert Obama's name with any other president/Prime Minister you wish.

The purpose of the thread is to ask if voters get any say or "refund" if thier choice lies about what they are going to do.

I am asking if there is any way of addressing the situtation through lawful means.

Call it ignorance if you wish, but i have very little interest in politics, mainly due to how corrupt most of them are.

I mentioned Obama, after reading yet another thread on what he has promised and what he has done instead....

Change: Obama Signs Statement, allows him to Ignore US Laws

So please could i confirm, this is not an Obama bashing thread, i'mjust using him as an example. I appreciate that he has a lot of mess to sort out after Bush, but you can't deny that in teh few short days he's been in office, he's also adding to it.

CX.

reply to post by CX


The answer is no.

There is no recourse for voters in this instance.

As I tried to say in my previous post, making promises is easy, but delivering on them is difficult.

And I'll say this more directly. Obama has been busier in his first year than any president that I can remember.

I don't agree with many of his policies, but no one can say that he's not trying.

When judging a candidate it is best to try to determine his values from what he says and what he has done.

A man's identifiable values and his history tell much more than the promises he makes.