Trail Of Broken Promises

David Sirota writing in Salon on Obama's lengthening trail of broken campaign promises:
Behavior by President Obama suggests a more systemic assault on the campaign promise is underway.
It started in December when he was asked why he was making Hillary Clinton his chief diplomat after criticizing her qualifications and promising Democratic primary voters that his views on international relations were different than hers. He responded by telling the questioner "you're having fun" trying "to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign." The implicit assertion was that anyone expecting him to answer for campaign statements must just be "having fun" -- and certainly can't be serious.
A few months later, in reversing a five-year-old commitment to support ending the Cuban embargo, Obama offered no rationale for the U-turn other than saying he was "running for Senate" at a time that "seems just eons ago" -- again, as if everyone should know that previous campaign promises mean nothing.
At least that was a response. After the New York Times recently reported that "the administration has no present plans to reopen negotiations on NAFTA" as "Obama vowed to do during his campaign," there was no explanation offered whatsoever. We were left to recall Obama previously telling Fortune magazine that his NAFTA promises were too "overheated and amplified" to be taken literally.
It's true that politicians have always broken promises, but rarely so proudly and with such impunity.
We once respected democracy by at least demanding explanations -- however weak -- for unfulfilled promises. Then we became a country whose scorched-earth campaigns against flip-flopping desensitized us to reversals. Now, we don't flinch when our president appears tickled that a few poor souls still expect politicians to fulfill promises and justify broken ones.
The worst part of this devolution is the centrality of Obama, the prophet of “hope” and “change” who once said that "cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom." If that's true, then he has become America's wisest man -- the guy who seems to know my kids will laugh when I tell them politicians and voters once believed in democracy and took campaign promises seriously.