Rating Obama: B+
I know some on the Left are unhappy with President Barack Obama, and the Right thinks he's a Communist Devil, but the year since Obama's victory has been an amazing political feat for the President, a boost for his agenda and a benefit to the country and planet.
* He and the Congress prevented another true, Great Depression with interventionist economics.
* The Climate Change bill is through the House.
* Health care reform is moving forward.
* Some structural changes have been laid down on banks and Wall Street.
* Post-Bush arrogance worldwide is being rolled back.
That Obama could get anything started or implemented with the hand that was dealt to him is miraculous.
The Right will always hate Obama and resist giving him any credit.
I think liberals and Democrats, if reasonable and pragmatic, need to stand with Obama as the rest of this term plays itself out.
4 comments:
Obama gets a generous gentleman's D.
Low Average, barely making it.
He promised a whole lot more than he's delivered.
He's stacked the Treasury and his stable of economic advisers with tired Wall Street finaglers and hacks: Rubin, Geithner and Summers.
He's as backward as Clinton (who put his signature, after all, on the Toricelli Bill) ever was on Cuba. Just this week he forced the New York Philharmonic to back out of a Havana concert date (at the last minute) because right wing Cubans at CANF along with lame duck Senator Menendez raised a stink. Moreover, he was able to persuade only two other sovereign nations among the 187 in the UN General Assembly to stand with him in continuing the blockade and travel ban on Cuba. Those two were Palau and Israel. Palau has a total population of 20,000. Israel is a fraud (on this and other issues) since they vote to uphold the US embargo, yet have major trading relationships with Cuba.
He has an Attorney General who is almost as reckless as the Bush gang with solemn obligation to safeguard civil liberties. AG Holder consistently shows an unseemly and immoral preference for protecting those who justified the torturers.
He was elected a year ago today. There are 97 vacancies in the Federal District courts and Courts of Appeals. Obama has nominated only 18 judges to fill these open positions. This is plain laziness. It is 99% staff work; and the staff isn't producing.
Lazy? Timid? Indecisive? Any way you slice it he's shown himself deficient in too many areas.
James, you're deeply mired in grade inflation.
I agree, more or less. Obama has also ended the new cold war that Bush had started with Russia. Obama has also modified the Bush missile defense policies enough to make many international states including Russia back down from their increasingly aggressive stances. He's done much better on most things than Bush II, which is not saying much.
If he gets health insurance reform passed, I'd give him an A-. So far, it has gotten farther than under any other president in history. It's too bad employer-provided health care is such the standard now, but that's another battle.
Any advancement correcting the neo-conservative mistakes deserve strait A's
How about a ‘C’ for the candidate that Obama apparently still thinks he is instead of actually being the President.
A prime example of this was last Thursday night when Americans and the media tuned into see the commander-in-chief’s response to the tragedy at Ft. Hood and faced with a choice of his jocular “shout-out” political speech on one hand versus immediately addressing the killing of 13 people military personnel – Obama choose the political.
On second thought maybe it should be ‘C’ for clueless.
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