The Obameter
Hey, remember when I told you about hundreddays.org? Well, cheap laughs aside, here’s a site that might actually be worth following.
“PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.” At the time of this writing, six promises have been kept, fourteen are in the works, and one has been stalled.
There’s a thread about this on MetaFilter, and some of the posters seem upset about all this scrutiny. But there’s nothing wrong with holding a president accountable for the promises he made on the campaign trail – in fact, in a democracy, that’s what you’re supposed to do. On their main page, PolitiFact quotes Obama as saying “I want you to hold our government accountable. I want you to hold me accountable.” They followed it up with their own “Okay, we will.”
And the best part is, it looks like he’s doing a pretty good job so far. Signing an executive order to close Guantanamo was certainly a good choice. It will be interesting to see how things progress throughout the course of his term, and I think that this will be a website worth following. Yes, even more so than a website that currently has a picture of Obama with the word “Rainbows” written under it.
Thanks to Funkaoshi for the link. In the meantime, the White House also relaunched a brand new website on Tuesday, which includes an official blog. That’s got to be worth a look, right?