Pretty much with YogSosoth here.
To me he is delivering exactly as advertised and I am pretty pleased. B+ overall. With some hard work he might be able to pull it up to an A by the end of term one, but no one deserves an A this early on. He is finessing his way through some difficult tasks and playing it exactly I had hoped he would: he has been a slightly left of center moderate pragmatist. He is playing his term just like he would play out a long night of poker: don’t bet all your chips on one hand; fold early when you the odds are poor that you’ll win; play the odds; bluff rarely; read the other players well; and at the end of the night the other players look up to see that while they’ve each one some big dramatic hands and whooped it up, somehow you’ve quietly accumulated most of the pot.
I especially give him an A on health care reform (assuming it gets past reconciliation etc.). There were many ways to flunk this one in my books. The most obvious would have been to end up keeping the status quo. The easiest way to fail would have been by being a dogmatist, as the progressives would have had him be. Getting something past Congress that actually gets the vast majority of Americans covered in a way that they can all afford and that over a moderate term lowers costs, and that instead of trying to fix everything at once creates systems to figure out best practices, is huge.
Afghanistan ramping up as Iraq ramps down is exactly as he had advertised and I agree with him now just as I had during the election season.
The economy is doing better than I would have hoped. I am amused by the fact that the same people who felt that there would be ongoing decline in the GDP until sometime in 2010, dismiss GDP recovery as immaterial once it recovered to positive territory by the third quarter of 2009. Of course Obama can’t trumpet that while unemployment is still high but the fact is that unemployment is the laggiest of all lagging indicators. Jobs are assured of following GDP growth, but not until next year. And he is doing a reasonable job doing it in a way that allows us to best compete in the future in a global economy that does not favor us as much as it had in times past. Housing has stabilized; our mutual funds have recovered nicely so that I can pay for my kids’ college afterall.
Not pushing too hard on cap and trade while already trying to get health care through was the right choice to make as well, and the fact is that the economic meltdown bought him some time even while it made passage of cap and trade more difficult. (CO2 emissions are down with less growth.) As the economy recovers some will find that their new jobs are somehow “green” related, oil prices will rise, and selling the public on the package will be less impossible. Meanwhile his personal effort brought the Chinese more into the process (including some verifiability) than it was looking like would happen. The project is not yet turned in but the prep work for getting there before his term is up is very well done.
In fact he gradually bringing the Chinese into a more cooperative place in general. And Russia? Funny, all the noise that was going on that sounded like a re-emergence of conflict end of 2008, you don’t hear much of that now.
Security from terrorism? You want a 100% safe system I can give it to you. Just don’t let anyone board a plane or travel anywhere in any way. Short of that we are always going to have a balance to strike between accepting some finite (albeit very tiny) risk, and costs, including our being able to move about the country conveniently or not. If the worst we get is this hot pants idiot we are doing pretty well indeed, but Obama gets an A for reacting to it appropriately, not blaming the appointee left over from the Bush administration, but actually reviewing how things could be done better.
Social issues? I’d like to see him deliver on strong domestic partnership laws (equal to marriage legally, just not in name) at a national level while “marriage” laws are left to the states. That’s what he promised and while I can understand not wanting to distract from item one - health care - he can’t keep putting other things above it forever. He needs to do it during term one to get his A.
From my center left position I am pleased indeed and see the displeasure of both political poles as a very strong endorsement that he is getting it just right! I expect to give him an A at term’s end if his prep work delivers as I expect it will.
