Obama has the worst record for implementing SOTU plans since Ford


Calculations published at the Washington Times indicate that while President Obama will make a lot of promises and proposals in his State of the Union address this evening, it's unlikely that most of them will actually be implemented.
Only about 30 percent of Obama's State of the Union plans to date have successfully been put into practice to date. 2013 proved to be a particularly bad year, marked by a 5 percent proposal adoption rate.
By contrast, President Clinton had a 44 percent success rate, despite working with strong Republican majorities in Congress. The only president in the last half century to be even less successful in implementing his State of the Union deas was Gerald Ford — who was not elected to the presidency and did not serve a full term.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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