Pelosi wasn't criticizing Obama for what he said on the campaign trail: she was acknowledging that candidates say lots of things; they don't always happen. Besides, Obama has no say over what Congress allows C-Span to show. And it's stupid of us for wanting to "see" these back room negotiations. No one is going to say anything on tv anyway: the deals will still be worked out in the back room.
But back to the question of what candidates propose on the campaign trail. Let's turn the wayback machine to 1992, when the Democratic candidates were proposing their healthcare plans:
...voters deserve to know what a candidate would do if elected president. But highly detailed plans don’t tell us that. Nor does the ability to assign some staffers to produce a plan indicate the skills necessary to serve as president. The plans put forward in the primaries are long forgotten by Inauguration Day.
That’s what happened after the Democratic primary-campaign battle over health plans in 1992. Bob Kerrey moved first, taking the left-wing position of support for a single-payer system. Paul Tsongas embraced the centrist, technocratic fix known as managed competition. Under pressure to produce a plan, Bill Clinton half-heartedly wrote one based on the “pay or play” idea, which would require employers either to cover all their workers or pay a tax.
But when Mr. Clinton, as president, unveiled his actual health plan more than a year later, it looked a lot like Mr. Tsongas’s. Meanwhile, Mr. Kerrey forgot his previous embrace of single-payer and became a critic from the right of President Clinton’s Tsongas-like plan. This isn’t evidence that politicians are deceitful or willfully break their promises. They were promises that shouldn’t have been made in the first place.
We don’t give our presidents total power to enact policy. They have to work with a Congress made up of people with their own views and constituencies. Does anyone really think that a plan cooked up by a bunch of smart 20-somethings after a couple of all-nighters amid the empty pizza boxes and pressures of a campaign is superior to what could be developed with the full resources of the federal government and open Congressional hearings and debate?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/opinion/24schmitt.htmlClinton's plan was not anything like what he proposed on the campaign trail. Of course, it never even made it out of committee, so that's why we don't bother to carp about what he promised. The only reason people are holding Obama's feet to the fire is that Congress is very close to enacting a plan. No, it's not entirely what he ran on, it's probably not entirely to his liking. But to pretend that every word a candidate says on the campaign trail is a solemn pledge that must be accomplished is not just naive, it's childish.
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