Less Heard Campaign Promises

First posted on 12-21-2007

In the race for the White House, we are all starting to hear the candidates’ views on Iraq, health care, immigration, the economy. But we don’t always get to hear some of the other things on each individual candidate’s wish list of legislation they would like to get through Congress. Some of these aren’t as well publicized, but are kind of interesting.

Like Mike Huckabee’s desire to ban smoking indoors anyplace where people work. By the way, Mike also would like to get poorer people to eat better by giving greater value to food stamps when they are spent on healthy food choices.

Rudy Giuliani, the manager, wants to let half of all federal jobs go unfilled as people leave and squeeze out the same amount of work from the ones left behind.

John Edwards doesn’t mind if, as president, he would not have the authority to actually pull this off, but he promises to strip Congress of its health benefit program if it cannot pass a health bill for all Americans within six months of his inauguration.

Hillary Rodham Clinton floated a concept of giving every child born in the United States a $5,000 savings bond to be used toward their education or to buy a new home. Pretty slick idea, but at a cost of about $20 billion annually, a potential tax increase of about $200 per year per citizen ($800 for a family of four).

Windmills are another Sen. Clinton concept. She saw the potential for cheap energy in Los Angeles neighborhoods by erecting windmills in vacant lots. Then, she expanded that idea to lighting up Las Vegas with wind and solar power because of all that empty land in Nevada.

And Barack Obama plans to post every single meeting between lobbyists and government agencies on the Internet for everyone to watch. Sort of a YouTube for politics.

Mitt Romney would hire outside consultants to figure out just what’s wrong with our government and layout a plan to fix it.

Not to be outdone, Fred Thompson would abolish the IRS, or at least calls for “dissolution of the IRS as we know it.”

Maybe it’s a desire to stand out among the seventeen major, declared candidates running for president this season, or the fact that it’s already been nearly a year since the race began and almost a year before we get to vote which one gets the job, but it seems the promises are more creative than ever this election time. Can’t wait until we’re in the thick of primaries. Wonder what will be left to promise by next November. Maybe a moratorium on campaign promises?