Presidential political strategists find that the road to victory often stems from establishing tactics based on successful past paradigm results.

When the Tea Party was given credit for helping Republicans score dramatic gains in the 2010 midterm elections that included winning control of the House of Representatives, many Washington watchers recognized that the way the victory was achieved was reminiscent of what happened in 1994 in the middle of President Bill Clinton's first term.

The shattering victory of the Republicans caused Clinton to initially experience crushing depression according to many on the D.C. presidential watch.  Meanwhile Republicans chortled at the prospect of winning the presidency in 1996.  

There were many independent observers not influenced by GOP euphoria who also believed that the tide was running so strong that it would be difficult for Clinton and the Democrats to surmount it.

Barack Obama has cited his current tax bill as an example that Democrats and Republicans can work together.

Of course they can.  This type of deal making was always available.  The current tax proposal is capitulation being packaged as compromise.  Republicans are always delighted to see capitulation.  

Only a Barack Obama would have the gall to stand before America and proclaim that outright surrender constitutes a grand triumph of the American political system.

Take your bow, Mr. Obama.  The top 1 percent of Americans possess better than 90 percent of the nation's assets.  More Americans are working longer hours for less pay.  When was the last time that the minimum wage was increased?  

It's a tired theme. Take the massive heap of Republican failures and affix them firmly to the top of Obama's head. Draw a big, fat target, and take aim.

Puh - lease.

Now, I expect Republicans to run with this nonsense. They've got nothing else. But as for you Democrats and Independents... Really? Are you going to fall for that?

Don't accept their nonsense. Stand up for yourself. For your ideology. For your president.

When someone asks you how Obama could possibly have the nerve to create such huge deficits in such tough times, please remind them that the historic budget surplus left by Clinton was unapologetically morphed into an ungodly deficit by G. W. Bush thanks in large part to a war based on lies and multiple tax cuts to the richest of the rich.

We should've been so lucky as to have genuine single-payer, universal healthcare here like the dangerous and frightening socialists abroad.

We would've been ecstatic to welcome ALL of our soldiers back from desert wastelands to our beloved fields of grain and purple mountains majesty.

We could've sighed with relief as those who built the catalyst for financial collapse were brought swiftly and brutally to justice.

But reality got in our way.

In particular, we met a pipsqueak, congressional minority eager to abuse the power of filibuster, a belligerent foe willing to fill the void of a U.S.-less Iraq, a resurgent Taliban, and an economy that would cease to exist without a functioning banking system.

With all that, with all the obstacles, with all the critics (from both sides of the aisle), Obama was still able to fulfill the key promises of his campaign.

Below, I've compiled what I believe to be the presidents most important promises fulfilled.

Top 9 Obama Promises Kept (So Far)

1) Funded Stem Cell Research

Cell therapy is the medicine of the next century. It's the approach that has the potential to be the most game-changing medical advance since the introduction of antibiotics. George W. Bush's halt to federally funded stem-cell research, delaying progress for nearly a decade, was a crime against humanity. If there is any issue upon which Obama has restored hope, it is here, and we should all be eternally grateful.

Numbers two through eight are after the jump.

Synonyms per the dictionary:  influence, authority, prestige, weight, credit mean power exerted over the minds or behavior of others.

In April 1955 I arrived in Chicago just in time to see the first Mayor Daley elected for the first time.  Twenty-two years of residency provided a practical course to those years of study concerning American government.  

Mayor Daley was dead before I left but his name remains on the Square at City Hall.  He was famous for instructing Cook County, not to mention Springfield, how to run things.  

Perhaps hizzoner was most famous during the 1960 election where Illinois decided the election of two Senators, veterans both, for the highest office in the land.  Wiki at one time described Hillary Clinton, a resident of a northern suburb and a youthful adherent of Barry Goldwater, as being asked by the Republicans to help with a recount of voters in the South Side.  

Recently the President gave a speech to a graduating class about civility.  Betcha they heard it before.  However, no harm in advocacy for good manners, even in politics.  Name calling has hardly ever settled a point so maybe the Senators have a solution.  

Except while one commands the floor, referring to "my good friend from whichever State.'   he/she may be skewering the opposition with lack of understanding, intelligence--or a floor vote.  Perhaps that is how Barack Obama got into his mode of bi-partisanship.  

He can be the judge of his success.  To me it seems like he should avoid lectures in earshot of the public and those contrived party summits where he sits in the tallest chair.

While I am speaking my mind I would also offer advice to those in the media who claim to be giving news.  Others who admit they are analyzing it are on their own.  

For those interested in comparative government, and especially the British system, the historic appearance of President Obama at a Republican congressional retreat created an interesting precedent.

Understanding the meeting's significance, MSNBC devoted a special two hour segment to it featuring regular political commentators Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow.  The similarity was quickly addressed over the historic presidential appearance and the traditional British parliamentary sessions where prime ministers respond to direct questions from that body's members.

There was one distinct difference between the Obama appearance and Britain's regular question and answer events.  In the latter instances a prime minister not only takes questions from opposing members hoping to score political point in the process but from members of the PM's party as well.  These individuals are also seeking to score points, but in a positive vein.  

Opposition members understandably post critical questions to generate the idea that all is not going well and that their party, given the chance, would do a better job.

There were no Democrats posing friendly questions at the Republican gathering in Baltimore.  The questions were designed to make it appear as if Obama and the Democrats were the true obstructionists in the legislative impasse and that their ideas were not being considered.

Obama used the meeting to his advantage.  MSNBC correspondent Luke Russert echoed a point made by others in the media that certain leading Republicans lamented afterwards that it was a mistake to hold such a meeting.  Based on the way that it went, such a reaction would be understandable.

Obama demonstrated with his cool and detailed responses that he is a master at absorbing public policy information.  Each time that the Republicans sought to link him along with his party to obstruction he responded with detailed information on contact attempts as well as aspects of legislation wherein ideas recommended by the opposition were included.

It was plain to see that the meeting was part of a broad Democratic Party strategy to show America that Obama stands ready to meet and work with Republicans.  

His cool and detailed presentation demonstrating a commitment to working with the opposition can in time put Republicans on the defensive if they persist in using the filibuster to prevent legislation from being considered.  

It should be noted that at Scott Brown for Senator rallies in Massachusetts Tea Bag types held signs displaying the number 41, indicating the importance of thwarting Democrats from obtaining the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture and defeat filibuster efforts.  

Amid the swirl of commentary following Obama's West Point speech in which he laid out his Afghanistan War policy the commentary that was the most brutally perceptive and historically decisive was that of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

Maddow followed the historical roots of Obama's comments and reached the conclusion that he sounds like George W. Bush in 2002 enunciating what was thereafter called the Bush Doctrine, which tragically espoused an aggressive concept of preventive war based on a posture of what might happen in the future.

A clip was played of retired U.S. Marine General James Jones, Obama's National Security Advisor, stating that there is no current threat to America's security from Afghanistan.  

Meanwhile Obama made his frequent effort to link Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, indicating that the deploying of 30,000 more troops can help head off more of the same kind of terrorist action.

Last week was marked by Senators Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch making one more grandstand play on behalf of "freedom" and avoiding surrendering to the ugly clutches of "socialism."

What a familiar refrain this has become through the years.  With FDR there was the American Liberty League and its panicky warnings that under Roosevelt's New Deal the grand republic we know and love was being plundered by socialism, and with it loss of our precious American freedoms.

Unlike what is happening now when Obama seeks compromise with those who are not interested in anything but their own narrow agenda and propagandizing toward that objective, Roosevelt knew the forces he was fighting and struck back in the public arena.  He exposed the forces of greed arrayed against him as "economic royalists" and pointed out that what they really feared was losing their grip on monopoly.

Oh how we need that kind of leader now!  In place of a leader who stands up to the lobbyists and those they represent, instead of confronting the enemy with cold, hard, irrefutable facts as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, the response is to see if a compromise can be worked out.

Just before the Bush administration fled the colossal economic meltdown, it rushed through the $700 plus billion bailout package for bankers and credit markets that had been responsible for this American economic tragedy.  This tragedy quickly ballooned into a global disaster.

The Bush bailout failed to place caps on bank executives' salaries or bonuses.  This left the door wide open for continuing corruption.

Traditionally only success can be rewarded with salary increases and bonuses.  All that changed during this scandalous economic downturn.  

The very bank executives presiding over ailing banks rewarded themselves with big bonuses.  None of this could have taken place if the tight regulations and controls Franklin D. Roosevelt put in place following the Great Depression had remained in place.  These regulations were established to insure that there would not be a rerun of the Great Depression.

While aides in Eric Holder's Justice Department stress the importance of investigating the CIA for abuses of suspected terrorists, Obama continues to make one disconcerting point.

On numerous instances, including the issue of investigating Dick Cheney and George W. Bush for numerous abuses, highlighted by taking America to war based on false evidence, Obama has made the point that he prefers looking ahead and not to the past.

As a lawyer and former teacher of constitutional law, Obama should realize that an imperative exists in that vital area.  As president of the United States he is compelled to move in areas where the constitution mandates him to take care that laws be faithfully executed.  

Two of the most precious areas of the Constitution that mandate vigilant action are conducting wars and civil liberty violations.  Instances of such violations abounded during the past administration of Cheney and Bush.

U.S. service personnel are not, definitely not, fighting now for the same reasons as what they fought for in World War Two.

There are those in the government who have propagandized to make Americans think that U.S. service personnel who have died or been wounded in Iraq for the freedom that lives and health were sacrificed for in World War Two, but the facts are proving them wrong.

The charge of being unpatriotic is sometimes leveled against those who dare to point out that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney led the U.S. into the Iraq War on a series of lies calculated to strike fear of a frightful nuclear holocaust.  

Saddam Hussein was terrorizing the U.S.A. with weapons of mass destruction.  The false claim that Saddam Hussein was well on the road to nuclear weapons development was calculated to frighten U.S. citizens into the Iraq War.

Since national health care is so inextricably linked to the public policy beliefs of Senator Edward Kennedy it is essential to recognize the linchpin on which its foundation rested.

When his brother President John Kennedy championed a Medicare proposal that would ultimately become law under his successor President Lyndon  Johnson its foundation rested on public policy.  Such had been the case earlier extending back to the Bull Moose Party platform of Theodore Roosevelt and comparable subsequent proposals by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Cost containment is the engine driving the historic proposal.  Its four presidential proponents along with Senator Kennedy recognized the need to hold down costs in the private sector in order for such a proposal to succeed.  For instance, I read just this week a figure that, since 2002, the profits of health insurers burgeoned more than 400 percent.

It is with this reality in mind that it was disconcerting to learn about an agreement that President Obama allegedly reached with the same pharmaceutical giants that have driven prescription drug costs up to record levels.  

Obama, how could you give no raise for 2010 for Social Security recipients?

As Warren Buffet stated in the New York Times last week, throwing $700 plus billion into the U.S. economy inevitably generates inflation.

Apparently when the individuals responsible for making the determination of whether or not there should be any increase in Social Security payments they chose to ignore the reality of inflation, and are throwing billions at the administration's pet projects instead.

One of Barack Obama's pet projects is dangling $4.3 billion at the United States public school system if states are willing to pass a law that could destroy the U.S. educational system as we know it.


 

The August 17 New York Times article on how Obama is attempting to change the U.S. educational system by Sam Dillon raises many ethical and moral questions.

Having been a teacher in California public schools with certification to teach high school and two years of college, I am well aware of grading controversies.  I taught in ethnic minority schools in Los Angeles.  When I gave 35 D's, I was hastily summoned into the principal's office.  The principal looked at my grading book.

"What are the I.Q. scores of each student?" he demanded.

"Why do you ask?" I inquired.