Let’s take a look at the Obameter

The consensus that I’m hearing from a lot of friends this morning is that it’s great that Barack Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize – and now that he has, maybe he can finally get around to accomplishing something. Indeed, even this piece in the Huffington Post asserts that the honour itself is “enormously premature,” and states that the opinion among experts is that “Obama was being honored for the hope of what he might accomplish as opposed to what he has actually achieved.”

The question of what Obama has and hasn’t accomplished at this stage in his presidency brought to mind a feature on PolitiFact called the Obameter. Designed to track Obama’s campaign promises, the Obameter paints a pretty compelling picture of an administration in progress. I’ve mentioned it before, but I haven’t checked it out in a while, so let’s go ahead and do so now. What do you say?

At the time of this writing, Obama has kept 47 of his campaign promises. 116 are in the works, 12 have been stalled, 12 more have ended in a compromise, and 7 have been broken.

For many, the most compelling figure will be the 321 promises on which no action has yet been taken. People are starting to worry aloud, as they watch the health care debate rage on, that inaction will end up being the theme of Obama’s presidency. After all, the man did make some pretty big promises – and to be fair, he’s also been saddled with some expectations that he couldn’t possibly fulfill, like the whole “marking the end of racism in America just by getting elected” thing. He’s got an awful lot to do before he can claim to have fulfilled the promise of his campaign.

The bottom line, of course, is that he’s only been in office for a little under nine months. I can totally agree, with that in mind, that he hasn’t yet earned the Nobel Peace Prize. But nor does he deserve to be written off altogether.

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