- Target:
- Speaker of the House Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid
- Region:
- United States of America
This petition was closed the evening before the November 2, 2010 federal election. If the author is still alive, kicking, and in control of his faculties in 2014, the topic of providing midterm platforms will probably be taken up once again.
After all, our two major political parties have been providing voters with presidential year platforms since the mid-1800s. And in this modern age of instantaneous worldwide communications, where today's printed news can seem outdated before the ink is even dry, each party's platform ought to be updated at least once every 2 years!
Please be advised that a few of the petition's links tend to be quite slow.
For those of us who remember news articles and TV commentaries such as the two following ones, it is common knowledge that President Obama and your Democratic majority in Congress have broken a number of major campaign promises.
JANUARY, 2010 VIDEOS
We were therefore surprised to learn that President Obama recently said:
"I keep in my pocket a checklist of the promises I made during the campaign, and here I am, halfway through my first term, and we've probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we said we were going to do -- and by the way, I've got two years left to finish the rest of the list, at minimum."
In evaluating this statement for accuracy, however, Politifact* determined that only 24% of President Obama's more than 500 campaign pledges have been kept. Either way, we have no way of knowing which of the many unfulfilled pledges your Democratic majority intends to honor, and which ones will wind up being added to the list of 22 broken ones. This is information that voters, especially the third who are Independents, have a right to know before deciding which political party's candidates to support.
That's why, as citizens who are deeply concerned about the future of our country, we urge you to follow former President Clinton's advice. When members of the Republican leadership in Congress provided voters with "A Pledge to America" in September, he said:
"I think that the president and the Democrats, even at this late date, should view this as an opportunity and an obligation to say, 'All right, they've organized their national plan. Here's what ours is. If you hire us for 2 more years, here's what we're going to do."
We also hope that you will stop spreading falsehoods about the Republican 2011-2012 governing agenda, especially "using Social Security scare tactics to gain ground before the November election." Similar claims were thoroughly discredited by FactCheck.Org and the Washington Post during the 2008 presidential campaign, and we believe your fellow citizens deserve a much more honest national debate about the major economic issues that Congress has failed to deal with.
* Politifact won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for "separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters" in their coverage of the 2008 election.
The 2010 Democratic Platform petition to Speaker of the House Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid was written by Tom Foreman and is in the category Politics at GoPetition.