Some Obama promises must wait

President Obama sounded a bit like a weary air traffic controller on Aug. 10, when he was quizzed during a three-way summit with leaders from Mexico and Canada about a promised overhaul of U.S. immigration laws.

“I’ve got a lot on my plate, and it’s very important for us to sequence these big initiatives in a way where they don’t all just crash at the same time,” the president said in response to a reporter’s question.

While Obama said he expects Congress to send draft legislation his way later this year, the issue, at least for the moment, has been relegated to the back burner.

Triage is a necessity in an administration confronted by a deep recession, with a president who is simultaneously shepherding big initiatives addressing health care, climate change, education and financial regulation.

Obama and his aides understand there is only so much bandwidth to accommodate these efforts — and to complete work on fiscal 2010 spending bills and second-tier issues, such as a proposed rewrite of the rules for student lending.

But that means a large number of political promises Obama made during his historic campaign have been pushed to the back of the agenda. Most, in fact. The PolitiFact.com Web site, which compiled a list of 515 Obama pledges, lists 374 under the category of “no action.”

To be sure, Obama has begun to make good on some of his most prominent promises.

Just days after he was sworn in, he issued orders to shut the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and limit harsh interrogation methods. Initiatives to overturn federal funding curbs on embryonic stem cell research, deliver a major address to the Islamic world and stem mortgage foreclosures, to cite just three others, followed suit.

Many other high-profile issues have been deferred, either because they involve time-consuming negotiations with Congress or because Obama simply doesn’t want to expend the political capital. Here are five that are not likely to be acted on before year’s end:

Revising ‘No Child Left Behind’
The 2002 education law (PL 107-110) was passed with bipartisan fanfare and promoted by former President George W. Bush as one of his most important domestic policy achievements. But its focus on standardized testing as the measure of achievement and the way it expanded the federal government’s role into what has been traditionally a local issue prompted heated calls for revision.

During his campaign, Obama said he would overhaul the law “so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them” and pledged to find innovative ways to recruit and reward good teachers.

However, a planned reauthorization has been crowded out by other domestic priorities, particularly Obama’s push to retool the U.S. health care system, making it unlikely that a planned reauthorization will move quickly. Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to complete a nationwide listening tour before submitting a proposal to Congress. His department is also overseeing the expenditure of about $100 billion in new funding.

Confronting China
Obama stated last year that China’s rise posed one of the most important foreign policy challenges to the United States in the coming decade. He promised to discourage China from manipulating its currency, the yuan, to keep the prices of its goods cheap and generate trade surpluses. And he pledged to discourage China’s support for genocidal and repressive regimes in Sudan, Burma, Iran and Zimbabwe.

Though Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said during his confirmation hearing that the administration would act “aggressively” using “all the diplomatic avenues” to change China’s currency practices, the White House has stopped short of making a formal declaration to Congress that China is manipulating the yuan to gain an unfair trade advantage. Such a move could spark punitive action and countermeasures from China.

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