"It could have been worse. And if we aren’t careful, it probably will be."

[scheming daemons]

Maybe the best column Howard Fineman ever wrote... his last for Newsweek:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/23/we-d-be-worse-off-if-obama-had-not-acted.html

Obama's Could-Have-Been-Worse Presidency


The last time I was in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, President Obama was in the midst of a very visible crisis and I was not impressed by the man he had found to handle it. Oil was vomiting from BP’s well in the Gulf of Mexico—cable TV was showing the ghastly flow live—but the federal official tasked with ending the siege, soon-to-be-retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, seemed way too ponderously bureaucratic for the job. In the Roosevelt Room, beneath a picture of the hard-charging TR, he sat stiffly at the conference table. In a laborious, jargon-cluttered presentation, Allen tried to convince me and other wise-guy reporters that he had everything under control. After all, he was the government’s “national incident commander"! Most of us in the room were predictably hysterical. The gulf was dead, as was the way of life it supported. We tauntingly quoted Malia Obama: “Plug the hole, Daddy!” she’d said—a disaster movie in the making.

Well, as we all now know, the BP hole is plugged, and while the damage to the gulf and the life around it was severe, it was not the apocalypse that world-class marine biologists such as James Carville thought it would be. BP is on the hook for $20 billion in damages, and America’s Solomon, Kenneth Feinberg, is doling out the dough. But the president gets minimal credit because his gulf achievement—and Allen’s—was comparative and abstract. They had avoided what would have been a worse catastrophe. It was a triumph, but in the past imperfect tense.

The BP crisis and its political aftermath are apt symbols for what ails, and what ultimately might save, the president and the Democrats. They are going to get hammered in November. He and they overpromised and underperformed. But if they avoid a blowout it will in part be because voters see the Obama that is, not the fiction they worshiped or dreaded. He is the plodding “national incident commander” for our beleaguered era, and his accomplishments—to the extent he has them—so far are mostly about how our predicament would have been worse had it not been for his bailing of water. It’s a hard message to sell in the midst of 9.5 percent unemployment, when dollar discount stores are all the rage, and the gap between the rich and everyone else in the country is as wide as it has been since the Progressive Era.

But he is what he is. To get a real fix on our 44th president and what he has done—or not done—it’s best to leave behind the grandiose language and grand expectations. He is a singular, history-making character, yet he is best defined by what he is not. He is neither the we-are-the-change savior his acolytes saw early on, nor is he the radical his foes see now. Obama is labeled a socialist by the hungriest recipients of government welfare in the history of commerce—Wall Street banks—but he is nothing more nor less than a legalistic believer in the regulatory state.

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