Assessing Obama
One year after his historic election, pundits are weighing on President Obama’s performance thus far. To be sure, this is certainly not the only occasion that pundits have seen fit to “grade” the President, but an anniversary like this one often provides the backdrop for assessments with pinch more certainty.
Unfortunately, those in search of a consensus on Obama’s work will be disappointed. David Plouffe argues that Obama has been everything we’d hoped and more, Arianna Huffington expresses disappointment in Obama’s failure to turn rhetoric into action, and Gary Andres at the Weekly Standard says that Obama has “sucked the veracity” from the hopes of his campaign.
We’re all grading the same paper, so to speak. It’s one thing to have a philosophical disagreement about a set of policies, but in this case, commentators are diverging wildly on a relatively empirical question – Has Obama lived up to his promises? The fact that those in different positions and with different ideologies see such radically different results is a perplexing reality of political discourse.
-Colin
UPDATE: The New York Times now has a nice, detailed comparison of Obama’s promises and policies. They must have read my post this morning.
Related posts:
- Obama’s governing philosophy
- Obama and Afghanistan
- President Obama and The New York Times must read this blog
- Obama the dictator?
- Obama and the Iranian election
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