The premature farewells came early in Bill Clinton'sfirst term.
During those exceptionally difficult yearsincludinga historic midterm landslide that cost Democrats control of both houses ofCongressthat young president heard members of his own party urging him to stepaside rather than run again. Instead, he formulated the strategy and tacticsthat led to his decisive re-election; a smashing midterm victory in the midstof personal scandal; and a presidency that has come to be regarded by theAmerican people as one of the most successful in the postwar era.
Obama Is Delivering on His Promises
For the moment, Obama enjoys no such reputation. Hisown starry-eyed supporters, who believed his rhetoric of change, aredisillusioned to discover that he is a politician, not a messiah. Hisopponents, who once pretended to share his bipartisan instincts, are delightedto obstruct his agenda, even though they have no solutions of their own. Heseems to be locked in partisan stasis despite the great mandate he won inNovember 2008 and the overwhelming Democratic majority.
The result is that too many Americans today believethat he has accomplished little and forfeited their trust. They happen to bewrongjust as they were wrong when they dismissed the Clinton presidency less than halfway into hisfirst term.
If scored strictly by his legislative attainments,Obama is a highly effective president. In fact, the scrupulously nonpartisanCongressional Quarterly rated him the most effective president of the past fivedecades, as measured by congressional votes on which he took a position, eitheryea or nay. When he enunciated a clear position in the House and Senate, hissuccess rate was 96.7%a number that surpassed the previous records held byLyndon Baines Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower.
If scored by his campaign promises, Obama also winshigh marks. That judgment also comes from a respected nonpartisan source, thePulitzer Prize-winning political Web site known as PolitiFact.com.
Tracking in detail the progress of 500 policypledges made during the 2008 campaign, PolitiFact has assembled an"Obameter" that rates each promise as kept, broken, compromised or"in the works." Their finding is that he has made good on 91 promisesso far and broken only 15; 275 are in the works, meaning that he is seeking tofulfill them, and 87 are stalled, which indicates little progress. For apresident who has yet to complete his first year, those are not only decentratings but a strong indication of good faith.
Still, the president's approval ratings have fallensharply, and his party seems headed for a midterm spanking. Those declines arepartly cyclical and normal, and partly the fallout from economic and militaryconditions that he inherited after nearly a decade of Republican misrule. Butthey are also owed in part to his administration's mistakes, in pursuing a stimulusprogram that was too small and scattered and a health care reform that is toocompromised and timid. He also suffers the lagging effect of his legislativesuccesses (including health care, if it finally passes in some form), whichvoters will not feel until many months from now.
Yet the Clintonexperience tells us that it is far too soon to dismiss the Obama presidencyandthat the loud stampede of the journalistic herd is almost always misleading.
%uFFFD 2010Creators.com.
