ideapalooza blog

Today I launched the Barack Obama Promise Tracker on the ideapalooza website. This document tracks 895 specific Barack Obama campaign promises. These promises were culled, compiled and catalogued into an excel file that will track promises kept, broken, and not-done.

A three month project, I read through every campaign speech beginning with his February 10, 2007 announcement through his November 4, 2008 acceptance speech. The Barack Obama Plan for America also became a major source of information for this project.

Each promise has a link to its original source. A check box is provided to monitor promise activity.

The file can be downloaded from the ideapalooza website for business or personal use. The file can be shared with colleagues or friends.

Users are encouraged to provide feedback to the author on promises kept or broken. This will allow the community to participate in monitoring and updating the Promise Tracker providing for the publication of subsequent versions.

It should be noted that this project could not have been completed without the BarackObama.com website which provides links to the Barack Obama Plan for America and all of his speeches. Perhaps we have entered into a new era of transparency.

The purpose for the Promise Tracker relates back to an earlier blog, The Absence of Word, where I was lamenting the fact that neither our leaders nor we could make good decisions. We could not make good decisions because the information we were getting was filtered, spun, and often full of lies. Our leaders lie to themselves, each other, and us everyday.

I’m not suggesting that Obama’s campaign promises were lies. I’m suggesting that we need monitoring of these promises so that we can discern whether they were sincere or not. More simply put, we cannot allow our leaders to say anything to get elected. The days of ‘if a politician’s lips are moving he is lying’ have to end. We cannot afford this type of rhetoric any longer.

From my perspective, the promises are a double edged sword. If Mr. Obama keeps his promises, he might very well bankrupt the country. If Mr. Obama does not keep his promises, the eventual decay of our physical, political, and social infrastructure may very well provide the same outcome (morally speaking). My hope is that we end up somewhere safely in the middle.

But for today, The Barack Obama Promise Tracker certainly is a great idea worthy of the ideapalooza website role.

Todd
ideapalooza.com