One Year In

Barack Obama was elected President of the United States with a gigantic mandate. He rode into office with a gigantic approval rating, with a great percentage of the popular vote and the electoral college, and had captured part of the nation’s psyche which pined for a change to the way in which things were being done in Washington.
When he came into office he could have done anything that he wanted. And we wanted him to. There were so many things that he was elected to do, and I am perfectly capable of understanding that he is not a miracle maker and that things are difficult to accomplish in government. However, he did not come into office with the goal of changing things as he had promised. There was no change. He promptly put people in charge of regulating and fixing the financial system who had helped to destroy it in the first place (deregulating fans Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, etc.)
As opposed to changing the discourse, coming at the opposition with fire and brimstone, he tried to hold hands and sing kumbayah. Ronald Reagan spent the first four years of his presidency painting the Democrats as the party of economic disaster, ineptitude, and weakness. When FDR came into office referred to the Republicans and the banking industry as “Economic royalists.” Barack Obama tried to start an age of “bipartisanship.” There is no bipartisanship; there has never been bipartisanship. There is one side and the other side, and the one that is able to get things is able to paint the other side as the party of evil. He should have come into office with a wider and more radical mandate, he should have been angry, and directed that anger at those that brought us to this economic condition.
President Obama came into office with the direst economic situation since the Great Depression. Yes, the unemployment rate is hovering around 10% of the population, which is incredibly high for the United States. However, the underemployed, ie: those who are working part-time jobs is nearer to 20%. That would qualify as something similar to a Depression. That would mean that something as radical as the New Deal is warranted. The reasons, among others, have been listed in previous pieces posted to this site.
Yet, when President Obama began, he instantly spent political capital by beginning what could have been the crowning jewel of his Presidency and one of the greatest national achievements in our history: universal healthcare. Instead, he came to the table with an already compromised bill. He did not start at an extreme and work toward a compromise; he came with a compromise and worked toward an even worse version of the bill. We are about to have a healthcare bill. One that is a payout to the health insurance industry, one that will not give universal healthcare, and one that will increase profits for the insurance companies.
President Obama has yet to accomplish anything that he came into office with the intention of doing. He has not closed Guantanamo, brought home the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, taken steps to re-regulate the financial industry, taken steps to decrease the disparity between economic classes (the greatest since the Gilded Age), increased gay rights, abortion rights, or anything else that he was elected to do. Our infrastructure is crumbling; we drive on roads that were built in the 1950’s, there’s a reason that a bridge collapsed in Minnesota. Yet, President Obama has done nothing to address our infrastructure. Rather than giving us an economic stimulus package that concentrated on jobs, public works, and improving infrastructure, he gave us a package that concentrated on tax cuts.
I understand that President Obama has only been in office for a year. But, a year is a long time in office. One year into his Presidency, FDR had start most of the New Deal. He had given the country the WPA, the NRA, Banking Reforms, the FDIC, and many other things which changed the way the country functioned. These were all measures that put the country back onto good footing, that decreased unemployment and the extreme nature of our economy during that period.
An extreme time, a desperate time, calls for radical moves by a President. It calls for a strong President, one that is willing to call out the wrong and help shape new institutions. President Obama, so far, has been one of the greatest let downs that we have ever had. I only hope that this changes in the next three years to come.