奥巴马上任一年来工作情况

So let’s look at those significant promises that he’s kept then. What are they?

Well, most of them involve things that he can do with pure presidential power, things where he doesn’t need Congress’s approval, ‘cause that’s where he’s run into some bumps, where he has to deal with either his own Democrtic majority or a very vocal Republican minority. But of those 52 promises kept, some of them are quite significant including his promise that on his first day in office that he would direct military leaders to end the war in Iraq. We’ve rated that a ‘promise kept’. Another one is, he said during the campaign, he would send two additional brigades to Afghanistan. And he fulfilled that promise although, of course now he’s considering whether more troops are needed.

run into some bumps: bump本身是碰撞、肿块的意思，这里是说奥巴马总统每当碰到要和议会统筹合作的问题就比较费力，所以这里可以解释为‘碰壁’。

Also, so looking at your tally, what are the biggest broken promises?

The biggest broken promises involve, I guess what I would describe as sort of ‘the reality of Washington’. He made a lot of promises about transparency, trying to conduct government in the open. And those are the ones, they represents several of the promises broken. For instance, he said that he would end the revolving door for lobbyists, lobbyists who work in the administration, then go to work for a…as a lobbyist for a trade association, then come back to the administration. But we found that at least a couple of cases where he’s broken that. So we got that one rated as ‘Promise Broken’. Another one on transparency he said he would conduct negotiations for health care reform openly on C-SPAN, the cable network and have all those meetings public. Well, that hasn’t happen. There was one meeting that was televised. But the debate about the health care bill, the way that the health care bill has been put together is very much business as usual in Washington. It’s been done behind close doors.

All right, you know, no doubt, the US president has discovered the governing is harder than campaigning, right? But he has at lease three years two months left to go. Bill Adair, thanks so much.

Thank you.

All right. Time to answer the mail. Frank from Kenya wants to know is the tradition of having protraits of presidents painted still being practiced?
Well, Frank, in fact, they get a pair of pictures. The official portrait is a photograph until the president leaves the office. Then an official portrait is painted of the former president. Presidents often display their favorite pictures in the Oval Office or around the White House. The rest, end up in the museum. The tradition goes back to the very first US president, with Gilbert Steward’s protrait of George Washington. Not to be outdone, other presidential paintings were commissioned and every president has had a painting in some way or another. J.F Kennedy’s portraint was painted after he was assassinated in office.