Posts Tagged ‘first 100 days’
How Do You Grade Obama’s First 100 Days?
Tired of the routine 100 days analyses? Salon asked a wildly diverse compendium of opinionated pontificators, including me, to grade the president’s foreign policy, economic policy, and overall performance. Oh, in 200 words. Check ’em out.
How do you grade him? Please share your thoughts by clicking on comments below Here’s the report card I sent to Salon; they cut my last, and best (IMHO), paragraph:
Read MoreAfter Obama’s Presser: “Simply” Forward to the Next 100 Days
Really I’m not single-minded.
I watched every minute of President Obama’s 100 Days Press Conference (transcript here). I was enchanted by the reporter who asked Obama what had “enchanted, troubled, surprised, and humbled” him since taking office. Even though a quick wit said that sounded like a Facebook quiz, I thought it livened up the other, more predictable questions.
The answer I liked best was what surprised him, as reported in the Los Angeles Times:
“I am surprised, compared to where I started, by the number of critical issues coming to a head all at the same time.” When he first starting running for office, Iraq was dominant. The economy was an issue. “Obviously I did not anticipate the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” So unlike new administrations that deal with three big issues, he says, his has about eight to address.
It was delivered with a sense of humor, making light of the many problems on his plate and eliciting gentle laughter. The laughter at these events always sounds gentle. No big guffaws. More of a gentlepersonly acknowledgment that something humorous has been said that makes the president more human.
Obama observed that every generation faces challenges and we will meet ours. This reminded me of the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s observation that every generation finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. That thought was still in my mind when Obama was asked the inevitable torture question and he invoked Winston Churchill’s objections to using torture because it wasn’t in keeping with Britain’s values. Waterboarding is torture, he said, and he acknowledged that the U.S. had waterboarded. This is huge. No compromise there.
I was about to turn into a little puddle of warm butter over this amazing man–his intellect, grasp of the issues, candor, sense of ethics.
But then came this exchange with Ed Henry, and I snapped out of it. Really, I’m not single-minded but old habits die hard, and I couldn’t help but pay special attention:
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