100 Days, 100 Mistakes for the Obama Administration

The New York Post has compiled what may be the only retrospective of Barack Obama’s first 100 days you need to read… Of course the Post probably shouldn’t throw stones considering the major gaff they made.

Here’s the top ten:

1. “Obama criticized pork barrel spending in the form of ‘earmarks,’ urging changes in the way that Congress adopts the spending proposals. Then he signed a spending bill that contains nearly 9,000 of them, some that members of his own staff shoved in last year when they were still members of Congress. ‘Let there be no doubt, this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability,’ Obama said.” — McClatchy, 3/11
2. “There is no doubt that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.” — Obama during the campaign.
3. This year’s budget deficit: $1.5 trillion.
4. Asks his Cabinet to cut costs in their departments by $100 million — a whopping .0027%!
5. “The White House says the president is unaware of the tea parties.” — ABC News, 4/15
6. “Mr. Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the ‘teleprompt president’ over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.” — Sky News, 3/18
7. In early February, the 2010 census was moved out of the Department of Commerce and into the White House, politicizing how federal aid is distributed and electoral districts are drawn.
8. Obama taps Nancy Killefer for a new administration job, First Chief Performance Officer — to police government spending. But it surfaces that Killefer had performance issues of her own — a tax lien was slapped on her DC home in 2005 for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help. She withdrew.
9. Turkey tried to block the appointment of Anders Fogh Rasmussen as new NATO secretary general because he didn’t properly punish the Danish cartoonist who caricatured Mohammed. France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel were outraged; Obama said he supported Turkey’s induction into the European Union.
10. . . . . and he never mentioned the Armenian genocide.

Barack Obama and his administration has made more than a few stumbles in his first 100 hundred days and it’s fun to highlight them… But lets not lose sight of the on simple fact: The era of big government is back and it didn’t start didn’t start with Barack Obama, it’s been been building slowly for years. Consider this, when Richard Nixon left office the Federal Register, where the government publishes proposed and final regulations, contained just over 29,000 pages. It ballooned to roughly 58,000 pages under Ford, and to nearly 73,000  pages under Carter. Under Ronald Reagan it shrank to roughly 55,000 pages, since then has grown steadily to over 79,000 pages at the end George W. Bush’s term.

Yes I know counting the number of pages in the Federal Register is crude way of measuring the size of government…  But no matter how you measure it the bottom line remains the same: every congress and every president since Reagan has grown government.

Related

A Hundred Anxious Days – Washington Post