Summer 2010

Gosh, it has been almost a year since I wrote a formal blog and posted it. Instead of commenting using my own site, I started responding to blogs on the Huffington Post site which in my mind is the premier blogging site on the internet, followed next by Truthdig. But Truthdig seems to appeal to bloggers who lean heavily to conspiricy theory politics. Huffington Post is my primary source of information today except for my two local newspapers. I like the writers on Huffington and I mostly like the caliber of responses. I now have over a 100 fans who like my posts on Huffington. I also get a lot of negative responses from conservatives who don't like what I have to say, but they can't give me a negative rating.

Now that President Obama has been in office for 18 months, it is a good time to look at his record so far. If I was grading, I would give him a solid "B". Based on goals he outlined in his book "Audacity of Hope", I would give him an "A". Why the disparity? In his book, he comes across as a solidy mainstream moderate who believes strongly is being able to work across the aisle to get legislation accomplished with the help of the opposition party. He did exactly what he said he was going to do in his book. He did try and reach across the aisle. His reward was to get two-three Republican's to help him pass his major legislation. That's not really enough to qualify as bi-partisan. As a progressive, I'm not to happy with all of the bending over backwards to try and get Republican help, when it was obvious from day one of his presidency that that was not going to happen. Nontheless it is hard to argue that on the major issues facing us, he has delivered on his campaign promises: health care reform, reform of Wall Street and the banks, a change in war policy from Iraq to Afghanistan, and passing of a major stimulus package to get the economy back on track. Those are some pretty amazing accomplishments in a year and 1/2.

What has hurt the president is the efficiency of the right wing attack machine led by Fox News, that have attacked him and his party since he took office. Part of this is due to the relentless criticism George W. Bush took in his second term when it became obvious he was ineffectual on the war in Iraq, the economy, and Hurricane Katrina. The right wing took the criticism's personally and wanted payback once Obama came into power. The rise of the tea party movement with their concern over the cost of bailing out Wall Street (which happened on Bush's watch) and the cost of the stimulus package, has not helped either. What they don't know or don't want to know if that the primary culprit of our deficit spending has been the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afganistan, and the Bush tax cuts, not Obama's policies, which account for only ten percent of the deficit. Obama has also been impacted by his slowness to recognize that BP was not shooting straight with him on the Gulf oil spill. He should have known that BP has a bad track record in safety and has the highest level of fines of any oil company in history. Obama also got sandbagged by the Bush Administration which downplayed the severity of the recession in 2008, and led Obama to use lower unemployment percentages as his benchmark. Just as JFK got suckered by the Joint Chiefs into the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, so has Obama been snookered. But like JFK, he is a quick learner, and will be a lot more wiser in the future. No if he can only learn his lesson in not listening to Fox News or at least telling his department heads to ignore Fox.

Now it is up to the president and his team to get his message of success out to the electorate, especially to independent votes who seemed to have been swayed by the right wing talking points of Republican's who have opposed the Obama Administration at every step. Democrats are still behind Obama, and Republican's will never vote for him anyway. It will be an interesting Fall as the campaign rhetoric starts in full swing. I am hopeful that the Democrats will be able to get their message out in enough parts of the country to maintain their control of both houses of Congress.