Monday, March 19, 2012

President Obama's go-it-alone program only goes so far

Stymied by Republicans, an exasperated President Barack Obama told the nation he would go it alone and use his executive authority to get things done....“We can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job,” he said in Las Vegas in October. “Where they won’t act, I will.”

But five months and almost three dozen announcements later, a closer look at the We Can’t Wait program shows just how hamstrung the president has been in acting on his own to provide expansive or quick relief to struggling Americans.

Some initiatives involve little more than a new website, a pilot program or a brochure. Others are basically repackaged announcements of programs already well under way. Yet others are works in progress, waiting on the government bureaucracy to catch up with the urgency of Obama’s “we can’t wait” mantra....