In a year when there was literally almost nothing for Obama and Democrats to celebrate, the battered supporters of Obama latched on to this previous week like Obama had just put his naysayers on the ropes. I’ll give credit where credit is due, but I’m not so quick to say that because of a few “hope”ful sounding words from Obama that he has quieted all sources of criticism.

Obama is always at his best when he’s talking; talking has never been his problem. The problem comes with actions. Democrats will point to 3 items to declare this week a success for Obama (The State of the Union, Obama visiting the GOP retreat, and Obama cutting $20 billion from the budget). On the surface, I am happy for two of them, but I’d like to pick apart each item further.

Obama’s State of the Union was 70 minutes of double-talk masked with elegantly phrased rebuttal’s to anyone that disagreed with him. His first 5 minutes were a verbal bucket of George Bush blame being poured out. The final 65 minutes were numbingly full of talking points for Democrats intermixed with more blame and comments of staying the course. I’d love to go in depth on the address, but I’ll just paint a picture to show the value of Obama’s words. Below are only 5 examples detailing broken promises from Obama.

1. Obama met with only Democrats in a closed door meeting (another thing he said he’d put an end to) to discuss what he wants for health care after he promised numerous times to broadcast all meetings on C-Span.
2. Obama promised a 5 day review for bills signed into law where they would be posted on the White House website. He is actually yet to do this and has already broken it a few times.
3. Obama’s promised 48 hours for Congress to review the Stimulus package. The bill was called to vote only 15 hours after the 1100 page document was drafted.
4. Obama promised earmark reform. His own omnibus had over 9,000 earmarks. The pork laden Omnibus was also signed without a review by the people.
5. Obama promised an end to no-bid contracts. He definitely went back on this to the point that he even rewarded a no-bid contract to a campaign contributor.

I could go on, but you get the point. Obama says what sounds nice, but fails to live up to his words. He said a lot of nice things this week, but why should I believe him, especially when he tried to sell to the American people that the economy was his #1 concern. Sorry Obama, we’ve heard nothing but health care talk from you the last 11 months. Don’t try to re-write history now that the Massachusetts vote ripped your agenda apart.

Maybe I should believe him because he was the first President EVER to address the opposition at one of their retreats? Come on pundits, do some due-diligence…or at least trouble yourselves with a 10 second Google search. It took me all of that much time to cite that Bush did the same thing. Either way, it is a positive step, right? Nope. This was just political posturing and a photo-op. To say this accomplished anything would be akin to saying that changing your diet to only drink diet soda’s will start melting off the extra pounds.

Finally, I applaud Obama searching out items to cut in the budget, but let’s get serious. Obama detailed $20 billion in cuts this week. Some would say this is a step in the right direction, but unless we’re measuring how far we must go with budget reform in multiples of miles, then this was just an after-thought in the right direction. The federal budget for 2009 was $3.52 trillion. This means that Obama just axed .5% of the bloated budget. That’s one half of a percentage of the budget…yawn worthy posturing. The Obama stimulus package was 22% of the budget. Hindsight is 20/20, but Obama needed to be more responsible from the beginning.

When the year has gone so poorly, it’s no surprise that Democrats are hailing these items as huge successes. The Democrats are searching wildly for anything they can frame as a success. If we didn’t have a year of Obama in the books, even I might see these as positive steps. Fortunately, America has stopped listening to Obama and started watching him discerningly. This President is nothing more than a clever marketer. He’s going to start rebranding himself for 2012 this next year. Good luck, the masses have stopped listening to his message and grown increasingly despondent of the impact, or lack thereof, in his policies.