The Political Whore

Thanks to a little internal housecleaning at Creative Loafing (I mean that literally, not in the figurative sense of firing folks), a copy of “President Obama’s 500 Promises Deck” showed up on my desk this week. The card deck — not quite a game — is a partnership between the St. Petersburg Times‘ Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact and U.S. Game Systems Inc.

The Deck features 500 campaign promises that Barack Obama made during his campaign and that PolitiFact is tracking after the president said, “I want you to hold me accountable.”

It has been on the market for several months, but it’s not tearing up the sales registers of America.

“I think it had a little bit of a problem finding its niche,” said Lynn Araujo, communications director for US Games Systems.

The cards don’t have a partisan slant; they merely recite one of the many campaign promises that candidate Obama made and invite card owners to go to PolitiFact’s online site to see an update on what progress President Obama has made on each pledge. They look like this:

But while that is pretty nonpartisan, apparently would-be buyers don’t see it that way.

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The St. Petersburg Times can thank former Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia for its most recent Pulitzer Prize, because as it turns out, the right-wing Democrat is the one who inspired the creation of PolitiFact, the fact-checking website that won the 2009 National Reporting category award.

“It was at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, and it was the speech by Sen. Zell Miller making claims about John Kerry,” recalled Bill Adair, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Times who came up with the idea for PolitiFact. “I was thinking, that’s not true. [But] I didn’t do anthing about it.”

Adair had other stories to write that night, not covering a minor speaker at a speaker-laden national convention, and documenting lies in politics must have seemed like trying to count water molecules in the Atlantic Ocean for reporters seeking a traditional news story on deadline. But the problem of letting politicians get away with lying stuck with Adair.

“A lot of things that Zell Miller said went unchecked,” Adair said late Monday afternoon from the Times‘ newsroom, where a celebration was winding down. In spring 2007, Adair and Times editors were planning coverage of the 2008 elections, and he suggested they do a website that looked at truth in politics. “It was based on my own and others’ sort of shortcomings, that we didn’t do a lot of fact checking in the past and we let a lot of candidates get away with misstatments,” Adair said. “This is penitence for those shortcomings.”

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Sure, sounds like the new president hasn’t lived up to the seven vows in this speech. They are, as posted with this video:

1. Make Government Open and Transparent [PoHo: OK, it's too early in his administration to tell.]
2. Make it “Impossible” for Congressmen to slip in Pork Barrel Projects [the stimulus bill was certainly a failure of this promise]
3. Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public (republicans shut out)
4. No more secrecy
5. Public will have 5 days to look at a Bill [PolitiFact agrees he broke this promise.]
6. You’ll know what’s in it (Republican Senators didnt know)
7. We will put every pork barrel project online

What do you think?