The Obama Epic Fail Series,Part 1: Transparency and Integrity

We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, eic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:

• Transparency and integrity
• Foreign policy
• Economic policy
• Healthcare policy

Transparency and Integrity

Obama came into office promising to operate the most transparent Presidency ever. Sounded like a great future for full government disclosure and integrity of governing, we would be entering a new age of honest politics where politicians and the government it operates would be an open book to the world.

As with most Obama promises, the reality was the exact opposite of the promise. This has turned out to be one of the least transparent administrations in recent memory. From “losing” IRS emails to claiming executive privilege in the Fast and Furious scandal to stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests to hiding Benghazi witnesses, this Presidency has hidden, stonewalled, and lied about just about every scandal and law breaking act.

One way to measure transparency and integrity is to quantify whether someone is telling the truth. And the method to quantify this administration’s integrity has already been developed and published by the Washington Post. The Post runs a regular feature where they take government and politicians’ quotes and assertions and determine how truthful they are. Their measurement system is a scale of “Pinocchios.” The more deceptive or incorrect the statement, the more Pinocchios the Post assigns to the lie.

According to the Post’s website, the scale is defined as follows:

One Pinocchio - Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.


Two Pinocchios - Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people.


Three Pinocchios - Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.



Four Pinocchios - Whoppers.


And finally, an upside down Pinocchio is a unbelievable whopper of a lie.

Using this scale, a recent posting on the Minority Report website reviewed the many assertions and statements of the Obama administration and published the Washington Post’s Pinocchio rating of each of those statements and assertions. If a Presidency was truly transparent and in integrity, they should receive a minimal amount of Pinocchios.

Before we get started, lets recall that this process previously awarded Obama the “Lie of The Year” last year for his lie that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” under Obama Care. In fact, according to the Post’s analysis, Obama not only got the top lie last year but, in total, placed three lies in the top ten. Not a good start when talking about transparency and integrity.

Let’s see what the Minority Report found with other Obama assertions (please note that the following false assertions and statements are for ONLY 2014):

• “Unprecedented inspections help the world verify every day that Iran is not building a bomb.” (Two Pinocchios, 2/6/14)
• “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” (Four Pinocchios, 2/24/14)
• “We didn’t have billions of dollars of commercials [for ObamaCare] like some critics did.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/4/14)
• “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns … in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/9/14)
• “Thirty-five percent of people who enrolled through the federal marketplace are under the age of 35.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/22/14)
• “[Republicans’] willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a sense of how opposed they are to any progress.” (Four Pinocchios, 5/9/14)
• “I want to announce a few more steps that we’re taking that are going to be good for job growth and good for our economy, and that we don’t have to wait for Congress to do. They are going to be steps that generate more clean energy, waste less energy overall, and leave our kids and our grandkids with a cleaner, safer planet in the process.” (Two Pinocchios, 5/16/14)
• “At the beginning of my presidency, we built a coalition that imposed sanctions on the Iranian economy, while extending the hand of diplomacy to the Iranian government.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/2/14)
• “When you talk about the moderate opposition [in Syria], many of these people were farmers or dentists or maybe some radio reporters who didn’t have a lot of experience fighting.” (Three pinocchios, 6/26/14)
• “So far this year, Republicans in Congress have blocked every serious idea to strengthen the middle class.” (Three Pinocchios, 7/15/14)
• “If Congress fails to fund it [the Highway Trust Fund], it runs out of money. That could put nearly 700,000 jobs at risk.” (Two Pinocchios, 7/16/14)
• “Keep in mind, I wasn’t specifically referring to ISIL [as a jayvee team].” (Four Pinocchios, 9/3/14)
• “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth.” (Two Pinocchios, 9/25/14)
• “If we hadn’t taken this on, and [health insurance] premiums had kept growing at the rate they did in the last decade, the average premium for family coverage today would be $1,800 higher than they are. Now, most people don’t notice it, but that’s $1,800 you don’t have to pay out of your pocket or see vanish from your paycheck. That’s like a $1,800 tax cut.” (Two Pinocchios, 10/17/14)
• “Health care inflation has gone down every single year since the law [ObamaCare] passed, so that we now have the lowest increase in health care costs in 50 years–which is saving us about $180 billion in reduced overall costs to the federal government and in the Medicare program.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/6/14)
• “We’ve created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office.” (One Pinocchio, 11/11/14)
• “Well, actually, my position hasn’t changed [on immigration executive action].” (Upside Down Pinocchio, 11/18/14)
• “Understand what this [Keystone XL pipeline] project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/20/14)
• “If you look, every president — Democrat and Republican — over decades has done the same thing. George H.W. Bush — about 40 percent of the undocumented persons, at the time, were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/24/14)
• “It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — 1 in 5.” (One Pionocchio, 12/17/14)
•  “The history is that I have issued fewer executive actions than most of my predecessors, by a long shot. … If you ask historians, take a look at the track records of the modern presidency, I’ve actually been very restrained.” (Two Pinocchios, 12/31/14)

If you add up the total number of Pinocchios, assuming that the single upside down Pinocchio is worth five Pinocchios, you end up with a total of 55 Pinocchios across the 21 statements above. This gives you an average Pinocchio rating of about 2.6, putting per Presidential statement the average degree of lie approaching the “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” level. Four of the 21 statements were assigned four Pinocchios and one was assigned an upside down Pinocchio, making them “Whoppers” or worst. 

You cannot claim you are a transparent Presidency when even a main stream media entity, one that has been very favorable and biased in covering the Obama administration, rates the President’s statements so unfavorable and deceptive. Thus, if his absence in Paris was an epic fail and a missed opportunity, then his failure in the area of transparency and integrity arena was also an epic fail. 

If he was true to his promise of government transparency, he could have ushered in a new dawn of trust between Washington and the rest of the country. The only thing he has ushered in is a new low in trust of anything that comes out of a Washington politician’s mouth. Epic fail. 

More analysis in different areas coming in the following days.

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