Words.
"With his poll numbers shrinking and pending healthcare legislation more controversial than ever, President Obama's critics are celebrating his much-diminished presidency.
And if unemployment numbers don't improve, the president may not just be a diminished president but a finished one.
Still, Barack Obama will today complete one of the more successful first years of any modern president. Love him or hate him, Obama has demonstrated that he can be both president and presidential in the face of some galactic challenges.
And if his competence (and luck) hold and he learns how not to overreach, who knows? Obama may well emerge down the road as one of America's better presidents.
Obama's critics on the left and right, and a good many people in between, clearly don't see it that way. For them, he's both a threat and a disappointment. The president has validated Republicans' worst fears about big government, and he's betrayed his base's dreams for real reform. For both, Obama has emerged as a kind of empty suit, long on rhetoric, short on action, with a set of confused priorities that are driving the nation deeper into debt.
But like a judge in platform diving at the Olympics, any fair and honest evaluator of the president's first year needs to take into account the degree of difficulty of the dive.
...Our greatest presidents (Washington, Lincoln and FDR, I would argue) were both transactors and transformers. They addressed the crisis at hand, left the nation stronger and created a legacy on some big political, economic or social issue that changed America for the better and forever.
Obama aspires to be one of those. As the first African American president, he looks to Lincoln; inheriting the worst economic crisis since the Depression, he draws a line to FDR; and on the verge of pushing through huge healthcare reform, he sees LBJ (the master legislator) in the rearview mirror. If this isn't the behavior of a guy who sees himself as a historic figure, what is?
And herein lies the problem: A president who wants to be transformational is trapped in a dysfunctional political system of oppositional Republicans, unruly Democrats and overly grandiose goals of his own making. He has no large Roosevelt or Reagan coalitions to support him; no martyred predecessor to unite the nation; no nation-wrenching crisis that compels the public to accept bold change and follow his lead.
A year in, Obama may well be coming to realize that while politics is about what people want, governance is about what they get. And maybe, for a high-minded, ambitious and overly confident (even arrogant, at times) Barack Obama, this isn't such a bad thing for him -- and for us.
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