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>And the candidate broke every promise... Hardly. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/rulings/promise-kept/ http://www.politifact.com/tr

• p4wnc6 11y ago
  The thing I hate about the truth-o-meter stuff (either promises kept or broken) is that so much of it is still subjective and a matter of degrees and opinions. If Obama (just as an example) promised to "implement" some program or tax reform, what exactly does that mean? Someone could feel like Obama kept that promise so long as he put forward (that is, lobbies for the introduction of) a bill about it, even if it was defeated. Others might feel he broke that promise even if he put forward a bill, and the bill was passed and signed into law, because they would say that the extent of the bill should not (in their opinion) count as "implementing" something -- e.g. it doesn't go far enough in their desired direction in order to justify even calling it an "implementation." None of this stuff is spelled out in specifics before election night and put up for bid on something like a prediction market. Failing that, I think we can only really say he "kept" or "broke" promises whenever there is a super clear, unambiguously understood outcome that can be indisputably verified and doesn't rely on anyone's interpretation of degrees. This also doesn't address the further fact that many people find some of promises to be really insignificant next to other ones, and so they might do an importance-weighted sum of kept promises instead of just an equal-weighted sum. The total number of kept promises may not matter to them much if two or three major promises are believed to be broken.