Originally Posted by Sean
Personally, I think that today's hyper-instant reporting coupled with the super-amplification of every expectation and criticism of the President makes it very difficult to gauge reality. While I too am right there with the idea of holding every President accountable, of course including Obama, I simply think that it's far too early to make many meaningful judgements about his major policies or his first term overall. A country of over 300,000,000 people simply doesn't recover in one year from an economic collapse, two wars, the constant threat of terrorism, a revitalization of bigotry, a steady march towards the destruction of our environment, and a trend away from the very principles that the nation was founded on.
Yes, the health care reform bill is looking to be clearly flawed, but we don't know yet whether it'll be a first step towards failure, or an effective way to simply get something passed that can then be modified and improved as we go. And yes, unemployment is still a huge problem, but could any President have turned that around in a single year given the economic conditions of our country? We just have to wait and see.
Beyond that, I tend to feel that the most passionate and vocal portions of society on both sides of the aisle - the ones that we hear screaming out their opinions on a daily basis - are a minority in the country. The vast majority of people are just trying to get by in their day to day lives - not wringing their hands over whether or not Obama's a "socialist" or a "fascist", or most amazingly both a socialist and a fascist, or over every non-stop criticism and bit of praise that's thrown Obama's way every minute of every day. So the perspective we get of the country through the major news outlets, in my opinion, tends to be skewed towards this vocal minority. And not surprisingly, this minority also makes for more attention-grabbing headlines.
Of course it probably also helps that I never actually thought of Obama as a "messiah" who would be solving all our problems the day he took office. Very few of his supporters probably ever did. That was always just a lame rhetorical tool that was bandied about by his opponents. So just as I roll my eyes at the declarations of Obama being a "messiah" or "the one" for those of us who voted for him, I also tend to roll my eyes at declarations that he's now a "pariah", or that we can already write him off as a one term President. In many ways, patience and realism seems to have gone the way of the Dodo in today's society.....
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