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This morning I joined Fox and Friends to talk about “Promises Kept and Promises Broken” since last year’s State of the Union address. At the top of the list, of course, was spending. Last January, President Obama announced, “Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years.”


Well, not exactly.  And I’m not sure anyone really believed that a president so committed to top-down, Keynesian-style economics was actually serious about this.  In reality, the president’s proposed spending freeze was in reference to 13 percent of the total federal budget – discretionary spending – and ignored the fastest growing area of federal funding, entitlements.  Conveniently, it also did not include the massive spending from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka “The Stimulus”) – or the forthcoming health care bill – much of which hadn’t yet been doled out.


What I didn’t get to mention on the show is how this broken promise, in particular, affected female voters. In November we saw the gender gap close, with Republicans edging out Democrats with 49 percent of women voters.  Certainly profligate spending was, in large part, to blame. In an election year when social issues were dormant, the economy was front and center. Women, who today are accustomed to balancing the budget at home as well as at work, were acutely aware of Obama’s failed economic agenda and the out-of-control spending – from the $700 billion TARP bill to the $787 billion stimulus bill and the $1 trillion healthcare overhaul.


There were a lot of broken promises this year (not all bad), but this is one that lost Democrats the female vote.  Perhaps that’s why Napoleon may once said, “The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it”!