I wish Obama would have repealed the "PATRIOT" Act like he said he would... Thats one of the 3 reasons why I voted for him.... Another one was the closing of Guantanamo....
Politicians like Obama often make promises like this with the same open-source information about these programs that you or I have. What if the failure to follow through was driven by a change of heart caused by having full access the the details of such programs?
I'm not saying these details do justify continuation, just that we need to consider that there are things Obama did not know about these programs when he made these statements that he found out when he was elected thus changing his views of these programs or his decisions on where to spend political capital).
An analogy I would use is buying a car. On the outside it looks great. I have normal concerns, but the salesman won't allow me to either inspect it, or have an independent mechanic inspect it, but he'll allow his mechanic to inspect it and he'll report the results to me. That's what I feel our democracy is like on these issues.
The real lesson is that obama should have expanded executive power even more and done anything he could (including norm breaking) to executive order away as much of the patriot act and guantanamo as the courts would give him.
All you really need to look at is whether the insurance companies liked obamacare: they loved it. Because it was a great deal for them and at the expense of everyone else.
It did nothing to lower costs. It did raise the age limit to stay on your parent's plan, disallowed pre-existing conditions exclusions, and made contraception more accessible though. Those could have been passed separately without trying (and failing) to overhaul the entire industry, which ultimately contributed to the ridiculous pricing we see today.
Which were easily waived during your tax return process by showing you were below X income line.
I was making $27K a year at my previous job and couldn't afford health insurance. All I had to do was check off that I couldn't afford it in turbo tax which then verified I was below the cutoff line and the fees were waived.