NYT’s reports:

Confronted by the worst financial crisis in generations, President-elect Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are preparing to delay some of the promises he made on the campaign trail to avoid political distractions and focus on reversing the economic slide.

Although Mr. Obama has not publicly identified which priorities will have to wait, advisers and allies have signaled that they may put off renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, overhauling immigration laws, restricting carbon emissions, raising taxes on the wealthy and allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military.

…“I want to be realistic here,” Mr. Obama said in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on “This Week” on ABC. “Not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped.”

The economy is providing him an easy excuse, but the truth is he was never going to deliver on a lot of his promises.  He ran a campaign of promising everyone the moon, which he knew at the time he could never deliver.

I also don’t buy that these items are just being delayed to focus on the economy.  Several of these, which I bolded, deal specifically with the economy.  Given that, why aren’t these items getting put at the front of the line like other economic policies?  I’ll tell you why: they are bad for the economy.

What’s interesting here is not that Obama is willing to put aside economically damaging policies during a recession, but that he was ever advocating them in the first place.  He was, prior to the financial meltdown, willing to sacrifice economic well-being in favor of serving narrow special interests, like those of his union bosses.  This should tell us everything we need to know about his character and priorities.

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