The American Small Business League says that President Obama has broken a promise to help small businesses, and what’s more, revised his web site to make the promise disappear:
President Obama seemed to agree it was time to stop the fraud and abuse in federal small business contracting programs when, in February of 2008, he released the statement, “Small businesses are the backbone of our nation’s economy and we must protect this great resource. It is time to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants.” (http://www.barackobama.com/2008/02/26/the_american_small_business_le.php)
Since making that statement almost a year ago, President Obama has consistently refused to make good on his campaign promise, and support legislation to stop Fortune 500 firms from hijacking federal contracts designated for America’s nearly 27 million small businesses.
Not only has President Obama refused to propose even a single policy to address the problem, but he actually changed his Web site to remove the appearance that he had ever made the statement, “It is time to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants.” (http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/sbhome/)
(Via Riehl World View, via Instapundit.)
I can’t verify this claim, because the most recent Internet Archive crawl of the Obama campaign site to become available is dated February 20, 2008, before the statement was reportedly made. At that point, there was no small business plan to speak of, scrubbed or no. Still, President Obama has scrubbed his web site before so the claim is eminently plausible. This is why I use WebCite to archive any campaign promises I find interesting.
POSTSCRIPT: I don’t actually care much about this specific promise. I don’t see why the government should have set-asides for small businesses (or anyone else). His promise to eliminate capital gains on small business and start-ups is much more important. When will that happen? It doesn’t seem to be in the trillion-dollar stimulus package, despite being one of the biggest things the government could do to stimulate the economy. Probably it never will happen, but at least it hasn’t been scrubbed yet.
Internet Scofflaw 