Once again, the Obama administration is back pedaling on promises that Obama made during the 2008 presidential campaign.  Most recently, the Obama administration was caught continuing a practice that candidate Obama criticized President Bush for during the campaign.  Apparently, President Obama does not see any problems of no-bid contacts now that he is the president.

As pointed out in a recent news story, during the 2008 campaign Senator Obama told a Grand Rapids group on October 2, 2008: ”I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all”.

As recently as March 4, Obama vowed to “end unnecessary no-bid and cost-plus contracts,” adding: “In some cases, contracts are awarded without competition….And that’s completely unacceptable.” 

However, despite all the campaign rhetoric and recent Presidential spin, the Obama administration continues to award no-bid contracts.  Even more troubling, they are awarding these no-bid contracts to firms that donated heavily to the Obama campaign as well as other Democrat organizations.

A recent $25 million contract was awarded to Checchi & Company Consulting, Inc., a Washington-based firm owned by economist and Democratic donor Vincent V. Checchi,  to provide “rule of law stabilization services” in war-torn Afghanistan. 

According to official records, Vincent Checchi donated close to the maximum amount to the Obama campaign as well as several other liberal activist groups.

This is a prime example of why pork added to bills is so corrupting.  According to a post at HotAir, “It’s a feedback loop to power; those favored with contracts get more money to make more donations to the people who get them the contracts.  This is the main reason why pork is so corrosive to clean government.”

As Obama’s poll numbers continue to fall, he will continue to blame Bush for all of his challenges.  However, now that he has fallen short on promises such as transparency, not raising middle class taxes, no lobbyists, and ending no-bid contracts it becomes clear that his biggest challenge is keeping promises.

One of his campaign pledges that I thought would be good was his promise to post bills on-line for 5 days before signing them.  This would give the people a chance to “know what your government was doing”. 

“When there’s a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government’s doing”.

However, President Obama broke that pledge with the first bill he signed.

Upon taking office, the new administration quickly changed that pledge by adding that non-emergency bills would be posted.  That seems fair, since if something were truly an emergency, waiting fie days could cause additional issues.  Now the administration is further changing the promise.  I saw today in the NYT, that now they will post bills when it appears that they will be headed to the president’s desk.

Posting the bills before they pass is an interesting proposal, but it leaves out close scrutiny as congress loves to slip extra pieces of legislation into a bill right before votes.  Case in point, everybody in congress was outraged by AIG bonuses even though they all voted for it thanks to Chris Dodd slipping in the language to protect the AIG bonuses.

Once again Americans are reminded that promises made aren’t necesserarliy promisses kept.  We can see now that as the president moves forward with running the country, those that voted for him are left with little hope for change.