Obama plus One: A score card

Everybody’s having a crack at analyzing President Barack Obama’s first year in office, so I’ll take my shot, too. Here are my 10 top take-aways.

1. It turns out, he’s patient. A year in, Mr. Obama seems comfortable hitting singles and doubles. Frustrating to supporters and critics alike. His allies want some home runs; his enemies want some strike outs. So far, it’s just steady progress on his agenda.

2. He’s spending a crazy amount of money. Mr. Obama has promised to pivot at what he views as the proper moment and begin reigning in the budget deficit. I generally buy the idea that we needed a huge cash infusion to stave off a full-scale depression. But so far his arguments about how and when to reign in the debt aren’t very convincing.

3. He’s not a socialist. That stuff’s so ridiculous that it’s boring. Yes, President Obama believes in a certain amount of regulation and a much beefier social safety net. It’s fine to oppose those things on ideological grounds — or because you think they’re too costly. But they don’t amount to socialism.

4. He’s not willing to be dragged into the culture-war pitfalls that crippled Presidents Clinton and Bush. It seems he’ll get to Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell and Immigration when it suits his agenda, not before.

5. He learned a lot from President Bush about how to ignore and manipulate the national media. That feud with Fox News? How can the White House lose controlling the conversation like that? And when they stumble into an issue that’s not so friendly (say, painful political losses in New Jersey and Virginia) the Administration just squares up and marches on.

6. The biggest thing Mr. Obama carried over from the campaign is the no-fluster offense. Unflappability freaks Washingtonians out in the age of Glenn Beck’s tears and Keith Olbermann’s nightly indignation. It’s hard to beat someone who just keeps whacking those singles.

7. I think maybe he’s completely on the up-and-up in his private life. Democrats will live forever in fear of Kennedy-Hart-Clinton-Edwards Syndrome, which has derailed more progressive agendas than Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan combined. But it seems that Mr. Obama is avoiding that trap.

8. So far, so good on the economy. I know, plenty still to complain about. We want more justice, more prosperity. But we were teetering on the edge of a cliff. Now, it seems, we’re not. That’s probably good enough for Year One, right?

9. He still needs a home run. Singles are great, but hey: He’s the one who created all these expectations. So what’ll it be? Health care? Immigration? Ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? All of the above?

10. Last but not least, he’s still benefiting from Republican bungling. New Jersey and Virginia may be evidence of a revival. But I think NY-23 is more symptomatic of where the party’s at right now. As long as conservatives and moderates in the GOP are mugging each other, Mr. Obama has only one thing to worry about…his own straying Democrats.

So there’s my take. What do you think? A good year for the President? A bad year? Has he saved us from Depression? Pushed us toward insolvency?

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