Obama's Brilliant First Year

[dtotire]

By January, he will have accomplished more than any first-year president since Franklin Roosevelt.
By Jacob Weisberg

Posted Saturday, Nov. 28, 2009, at 8:13 AM ET


About one thing, left and right seem to agree these days: Obama hasn't done anything yet. Maureen Dowd and Dick Cheney have found common ground in scoffing at the president's "dithering." Newsweek recently ran a sympathetic cover story titled, "Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)." The sarcasm brigade thinks it's finally found an Achilles' heel in his lack of accomplishments. "When you look at my record, it's very clear what I've done so far and that is nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it," Obama stand-in Fred Armisen recently riffed on Saturday Night Live. "It's chow time," Jon Stewart asserts, for a president who hasn't followed through on his promises.

This conventional wisdom about Obama's first year isn't just premature—it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record—how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.

The case for Obama's successful freshman year rests above all on the health care legislation now awaiting action in the Senate. Democrats have been trying to pass national health insurance for 60 years. Past presidents who tried to make it happen and failed include Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Through the summer, Obama caught flak for letting Congress lead the process, as opposed to setting out his own proposal. Now his political strategy is being vindicated. The bill he signs may be flawed in any number of ways—weak on cost control, too tied to the employer-based system, and inadequate in terms of consumer choice. But given the vastness of the enterprise and the political obstacles, passing an imperfect behemoth and improving it later is probably the only way to succeed where his predecessors failed.


more:
http://www.slate.com/id/2236708/?from=rss


comment: I hope he's right--I was getting discouraged

[liberal N proud]

1. Biggest first year since FDR - Yet for so many, its not enough

One would think reports like this would quell some of the unrest but I am sure the opposite will be true in this case.

[Ramulux]

2. This was a decent article

But he is focusing too much on health care. Obama has done quite a bit of stuff over the past year besides the stimulus and health care reform. I don't want to make a gigantic list but just off the top of my head, he restored funding to international health organizations that perform abortions, signed a historic arms reduction treaty with Russia, Approved the SCHIP re-authorization act expanding health care for children by about 4 million, and actually decided to slowly end the Iraq war. The Iraq war seems to be something a lot of people forget about. By voting for Obama we pretty much ended the Iraq war, obviously it is not happening as fast as it should but you must remember that if John McCain had become president there would be no end in sight in Iraq. Anyone claiming Obama hasn't done anything, has not been paying attention to the news over the past year. Its just a shame that some of his biggest accomplishments have received little to no media coverage.

[dflprincess]

7. Obama has done nothing to get us health care reform

even he refers to it as insurance. And, as most of us know already, insurance does not guarantee access to care.

[Igel]

9. It has to focus on health care.

Restoring funding to the health organizations was essentially an administrative that didn't increase funding but redistributed it. There's a great shortfall, so organizations that really need the money lost it so that other organizations that really needed it could have it. It's a zero sum game.

He didn't sign a historic arms reduction treaty. The people who said that misunderstood what was being said. Here's the update: http://itn.co.uk/0cb67a21d56da99c9acbdff67943d158.html . What the people going whackadoo over the signing went bonkers over was agreement on the framework that the talks would be based on. It's to a treaty what a memo of understanding is to a contract. Note that the treaty won't be signed before the historic treaty that it replaces expires. This was known and moves started, in rough form, to renegotiate it under *. Whether it's really new and groundbreaking remains to be seen. It might be historic in the sense that 11/28/09 is historic--even if nothing special, it's still happened and is part of history.

SCHIP was Congressional. Obama signed a bill. He didn't move it, he didn't push it very hard. There was no need. His signing the budget legislation last winter was no less a great achievement.

The Iraq war is ending on the schedule that was proposed last fall. That's part of the dirty secret of US politics. * wanted a drawdown, but no hard-and-fast timetable. McCain had about the same plan. Obama talked about a much faster drawdown, but we saw that ol' Change in action. Obama decided for a similar timetable and essentially the same drawdown by a few weeks into his administration, but wanted the timetable to be flexible. His administration, his rules, he got the flexible timetable. Notice that the drawdown hasn't been really quick, and seems to be waiting on the exact same thing that * and McCain talked about for precisely the same reasons--successful elections in winter '10. It's hard to see any white space between them, for all the blather about how different they are on this point. That's not an inherently bad thing, but does suggest that perhaps if Obama is acting wisely and pragmatically that. . . Well, let's not go there. Overall it's like describing the Statue of Liberty--is it a big green lady who happens to be holding a torch and wearing a diadem, or is it a nicely matching set of torch and diadem which happen to be modeled by a lady who's green?

Gitmo is the same. * tried to close it for a long time, but had two problems: Where to put the people that his folk thought could be released, esp. the Uighurs? And, where to put the people that he folk thought couldn't be released? Obama has the same first problem, to his surprise (he went, he asked, and only one country offered to take one additional prisoner), but at least managed, after putting together an aid package, to dispose of the Uighurs. The rest continue to be a political problem, one that Obama has engaged and one that * didn't. Perhaps because most of the opposition to the plan comes from the opposition, as opposed to from his allies? Dunno.

[elocs]

3. Is it anything like this Obama's Brilliant First Year?:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x22854

[dtotire]

5. Its the same n/t

[mike_c]

4. this is a propaganda fluff piece that would damn with faint praise...

...if readers were paying attention. Isn't this:

"The bill he signs may be flawed in any number of ways— weak on cost control, too tied to the employer-based system, and inadequate in terms of consumer choice. But given the vastness of the enterprise and the political obstacles, passing an imperfect behemoth and improving it later is probably the only way to succeed where his predecessors failed."

more or less the same as saying "passing an imperfect behemoth and improving it later" is just about the best he can do? And what makes that "brilliant?" The fact that no one previously has been satisfied with such a "flawed" and "imperfect behemoth?" Pushing crap is "brilliant?" I think more likely it's an agenda. :shrug:

[billh58]

6. While I understand the

"all, or nothing" argument, it should be noted that Social Security Insurance, much like the Health Care Insurance debate, got off to a rocky (and some said insufficient) start.

SS was amended dozens of times over the years, beginning just four years after it was enacted, and it was always Democrats who moved it forward, while the Republicans have continued to oppose SS, and have attempted to change it to a privatized system:

The provisions of Social Security have been changing since the 1930s, shifting in response to economic worries as well as concerns over changing gender roles and the position of minorities. Officials have responded more to the concerns of women than those of minority groups. Social Security gradually moved toward universal coverage. By 1950, debates moved away from which occupational groups should be included to how to provide more adequate coverage. Changes in Social Security have reflected a balance between promoting equality and efforts to provide adequate protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_security_united_states#Creation:_The_Social_Security_Act

As another example, it took much longer than just seven decades to move the country from the abolition of slavery, to the societal integration that we see today, and the job remains unfinished. The USA has never stopped moving forward socially, and the thanks mainly go to Liberal Democrats for those advances -- no matter how slow they may seem to any given contemporary citizenry.

[johan helge]

8. To me, it seems like the Congress, not the President, decides most things

- except perhaps foreign policy. So why praise or blame the President for what the Congress does?

[Igel]

10. Because sometimes the president does horsetrade to

get things done. Often a very popular president will get things that Congress doesn't much want to give him simply because he's popular and to nay-say him would be unpopular.

Also a president in the same party as Congress usually sets Congress' agenda, to a large extent. * certainly set the 2000 Congress' agenda, pushing for bills and finagling compromises to get his way. Clinton did no less. In this presumably they're just supporting the party leader. Sometimes you have to wonder.

Sometimes he sets the agenda because he's aware of a problem or initiative that Congress wouldn't know about or care about.

Often enough you're right.

[johan helge]

11. And the need to sometimes have 60 votes in the Senate

makes it difficult to change the US.

Krugman (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09krugman.html?_r=1): "And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster."