President Barack Obama has been in office for just under two years. Twenty-three months.<\/p>\n
As the clock runs out on this first half-term (not full term mind you) he has already pushed through sweeping healthcare reforms that eluded Democrats for decades.<\/p>\n
His administration changed radically the system for student loans, widening the pool of low-income Americans who can go to college and ending a shameful big-bank giveway.<\/p>\n
He used Roosevelt-era liberal economic strategies to pull the country back from the brink of fiscal apocalypse.<\/p>\n
And in the process passed dramatic financial reforms, reversing a generation of Reagan-era deregulation, which includes the first-time creation of a new consumer protection agency for investors.<\/p>\n
He also pushed through a tax plan with Republicans that is, in fiscal terms, extraordinarily liberal.<\/p>\n
Yes, it eschewss taxing the rich, but it also maintains high levels of spending and cash give-aways (in the form of payroll tax holidays and unemployment payments) to lower- and middle-income workers.<\/p>\n
Put bluntly, this is the $800 billion dollar stimulus many progressives were demanding, albeit with some strings attached.<\/p>\n
As I write, the Obama White House is a single Senate vote away from repealing Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell.<\/p>\n
Obama deftly deployed his top military commanders to help reform a policy that progressives — especially in the gay and lesbian community — have loathed for seventeen years.<\/p>\n
Yes, anti-war activists are, reasonably enough, impatient with Obama’s slow timetable for withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n
But it’s also fair to point out that Obama made it clear from the beginning of his election campaign that a quick withdrawal was off the table.<\/p>\n
And on the peacenik front, he also used his first two years to negotiate an ambitious START nuclear arms treaty with the Russians..<\/p>\n
The plan, which has a good chance of passing during this lame-duck session, would dramatically reduced the number of nuclear warheads in the world, and lessen the danger of arms proliferation.<\/p>\n
For the under-30\u00a0 crowd, that might elicit a shrug.\u00a0 But for people like me who grew up in the Cold War era, that will feel like a huge accomplishment, if Obama can win ratification.<\/p>\n
To be sure, there is plenty in these first two years for everyone to be cranky about.\u00a0 None of these policy victories were pure or unadulterated by compromise.<\/p>\n
And they didn’t trigger the turn-on-a-dime economic recovery that some Americans hoped for.<\/p>\n
But in the end, conservatives were forced to give ground on nearly every front, from government spending to conservative social policies.<\/p>\n
It strikes me that if anyone has a reason to complain, it is the tea party crowd, not the MoveOn.orgers.<\/p>\n
So here’s a question for our liberal readers:\u00a0 Was it enough?\u00a0 If not, what more did you expect from Mr. Obama in his first two years?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Barack Obama has been in office for just under two years. Twenty-three months. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[4856,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3405"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3406,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3405\/revisions\/3406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}