History will likely credit President Barack Obama with extraordinary prescience, wisdom and character for his performance during the initial two years of his term.
Obama recognized from history that there would be no way to maintain the large House majority and meet the 60% Senate threshold to enact reform after the 2010 midterm elections. So he seized the opportunity for at least three historic achievements: Health Care Reform, Finance Reform, and the Recovery Act, without which the nation would have likely sunk into depression.
The Watchdog was wrong when he argued that the President should have concentrated the Recovery Act on infrastructure, aid to the states, and tax relief, and not the one third for long term investment in revitalizing our economy and enhancing our competitive position in the world. In fact, the longer term research, development and educational goals of the Recovery Act will have a profound positive effect for years to come.
‘Pundits’ drone on about Obama not being politically sensitive. On the contrary, Obama understands that he was elected to bring about change that will save the country from further decline, and the Recovery Act has laid the ground work for economic resurgence. He did not subordinate duty to personal political ambition.
Compare this to a recent comment by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who told the National Journal, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Now we have returned to a more normal division of political power in Washington and the nation. Little of merit is likely to be legislated for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, much good will continue as an outgrowth of past brave actions.
I welcome your positive assessments of Obama’s less than two years of great achievements. I couldn’t agree more and those pundits who characterize him as not caring about people are really blind to his enormous efforts against great odds in trying to make reforms and changes that will benefit “the people” for now and far into the future. He has been trying to save the sinking ship he inherited.
Perhaps the KISS motto was not applied enough, Keep It Simple, Stupid. But of course, the problems are complex. People stopped listening to our President and there was a HUGE propaganda machine and political opposition that sought to demonize him and turn him into a scapegoat, with malice and hate speech, fueled in some cases by racial prejudice and in others by the desire of the Republicans and big business and banking to to regain and grow their power to benefit themselves. And the filibuster. And ………
What a tragedy. We have a brilliant, pragmatic, visionary president who knows what is needed. And the people for whom he has literally worked himself to the bone just don’t get it. To the detriment of our country.
Well, the sun will come up today and let’s continue to hope and work for what we believe. So awful to have lost many really good people such as Joe Sestak.
I am in agreement with your take on what Obama undertook during the first twenty months of his term and his understanding that he could not hope to have the political capital to deal with such fundamental reforms as health care after that time. His misfortune was that his planned program of political reform was interrupted by the worst economic conditions to face the country in three quarters of a century. Under the circumstances his record of accomplishment is most impressive.
His only hope of proceeding further with major reforms will occur if and when he is reelected. As I see it the major obstacle in that path is the mandated individual purchase of health insurance by those not fortunate enough to have it provided by an employer. Perhaps he will be lucky enough to have that feature struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, thereby putting pressure on the Republican House of Representatives to deal with the problem of paying for the health care of those individuals and taking the target off his back.
Here’s one for you….my Republican friend called me yesterday to tell me O’Donnell is believed to have been planted so Castle would be sure to be re-elected…… “Republicans say the darndest things”
I think that we can all (rightly) find fault with Obama. That said, I think that these first two years will be viewed positively by historians; a lot of important, historic accomplishments in truly horrible conditions (I often think back to the Onion headline the day after Obama’s election which was something to the effect: “Things Officially So Shi**y US Elects Black Man”.)
Obama has not been an effective teacher. Nonetheless, it’s hard to campaign on the counterfactual (it would have been worse w/o stimulus), complicated economic policy that is unpopular and counterintuitive (bailouts), and distant benefits (health care, credit card reforms, bank regulation, non-discrimination law). Maybe that means he should have pushed for more liberal versions of each, but the filibuster was a major problem (see point 4 below).
Moreover, I think it’s tough (if not impossible) to overcome such bad economic fundamentals. Most of the quantitatively oriented election forecasters that I respect forecasted huge Democratic losses last spring because the fundamentals were just so bad. These guys vary in the degree to which they believe campaign effects matter for forecasting (ranging from almost 0 to marginally).