Battleground Watch

ABC News takes a look at candidate Obama’s visit to this same conference  four years ago and generously concludes, “Obama returns to the group with many of those goals still works in progress, a source of frustration and disillusionment for some of his ardent Latino supporters.”  A look at any of the promises reveals “work in progress” should be replaced by “promises broken“:

In 2008 Obama empathized with the Latino audience:

“You know about the families all across this country who are out of work, or uninsured or struggling to pay rising costs for everything from a tank of gas to a bag of groceries.”

Four years later, Latino unemployment is dramatically higher since both then and relative to the general population.  Pocket-book inflation is going through the roof under Obama making groceries dramatically more expensive. Obama’s healthcare reform is unpopular with a super-majority (68%) of Americans because its raises the cost for insurance while decreasing the services available.

But Obama made plenty of promises in the speech:

• “ending the housing crisis”
• creating “millions of new jobs”
• expanding minority enrollment in health insurance plans

ABC points out:

The collapse of the housing market and a foreclosure wave continues to hit Latino homeowners disproportionately hard, studies find, with market recovery still struggling to take hold. On health care, roughly three times as many Latinos are uninsured than are non-Hispanic whites. And Latino unemployment is on the rise, at 11 percent in May, up from 10.3 percent in April and March, according to the Labor Department, which is higher than the national average.

The Romney campaign took advantage of its speech a day ahead of the President to remind the audience of the broken promises:

“President Obama will speak here, for the first time since his last campaign. He may admit that he hasn’t kept every promise. And he’ll probably say that even though you aren’t better off today than you were four years ago, things could be worse,” Romney said in an address to the NALEO conference on Thursday. “He’ll imply that you really don’t have an alternative. He’s taking your vote for granted,” Romney said. “I’ve come here today with a simple message: You do have an alternative. Your vote should be respected. And your voice is more important now than ever before.”