Looking at President Barack Obama's suggestion that he will sign the $410 billion omnibus bill passed by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives with 8,500 earmarks, it appears the president is abandoning his promise to stop congressional earmarks. The other possibility is that Obama has little control over House Democrats who want to lard up federal spending bills with their pet projects.

It's easy to see how and why Democrats want to cram spending bills with earmarks for favored projects in their congressional districts. When Republicans controlled Congress during much of the presidency of George W. Bush, that's exactly what they did. Now that Democrats control the House and Senate, they want to bring home the bacon through earmarks, which are spending directives slipped into larger bills secretively and with no open debate.

It is possible that Obama doesn't plan to live up to his campaign promises. But it's more likely that the earmarks in this latest spending bill are the result of Democrats getting their chance at the kind of spending on pet projects that Republicans expanded during the George W. Bush presidency.

That suggests that House Demo-crats don't buy into Obama's vision of more responsible and transparent government spending.

When asked about complaints from House Republicans that they were cut out of the process when it came to crafting the $787 billion stimulus bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of House Democrats, "Yes, we wrote this bill. Yes, we won this election."

That tone differs from what voters have heard from Obama, as candidate and as president. And although some believe he can walk on water and has high national approval ratings, it might be true that Obama has little control over Democrats in Congress.

The $410 billion spending bill passed by the House contains nine spending measures for the current fiscal year that should have been passed by the previous Congress.

Unfortunately, that scenario was used by Obama administration officials appearing on Sunday morning news shows last weekend. Both Peter Orzag, Obama's director of Management and Budget, and Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff, used the same talking points on the earmarks in the delayed spending bill, explaining with a dismissive tone, "That's last year's business."

But voters still should ask why Obama didn't make more of an effort to see that the bill was stripped of earmarks. He already has made bold moves to reverse serveral controversial Bush-era policies. Why not take a similar approach to earmark spending, which was a campaign issue, rather than let congressional Democrats go right on doing what they criticized Republicans for doing when the GOP ran Congress?

Candidate Barack Obama repeatedly promised that his administration would examine the federal budget line-by-line in search of wasteful and ineffective spending to cut. Why not start now, rather than give those potentially wasteful earmarks a pass?

Two weeks ago, it was the exposure of questionable, wasteful and non-job-creating spending in the federal stimulus bill, and now another big spending bill comes along that has been stuffed by Pelosi and company with 8,500 pet projects costing several billion dollars. It's becoming clear that Obama has decided to give the Democrat-controlled Congress a pass when it comes to living up to his ideals on spending.

With the $787 billion stimulus bill, rushed through Congress to avoid public scrutiny of spending details, and now an earmark-laden $410 billion spending bill, it looks as though Democrats in Congress view the economic crisis as not so much a crisis, but mostly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend more taxpayer money than ever.

If this trend continues, Democrats risk undermining Obama's popularity, and millions of Americans who have given the new president the benefit of the doubt will have doubts too great to ignore.