It's Not What You Say...

Eugene Robinson is the latest to comment about Obama's record as we near the midterms. A lot of hay has been made over this over the past several months, since healthcare passed - how much is the new president really getting done, the promises he's keeping or breaking. Kevin Drum posts today on the same general notion. On the other side, we have Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone pointing out that good at FinReg is, it's not that good - and Digby commenting that the mess in Iraq is far from over, even if focus has switched to Afghanistan.

The key to this debate, and to me, the most distressing part, is this: neither of these stances are mutually contradictory. It comes down to a punctuation mark.

"This is the most accomplished legislative session in a generation!"

VS

"This is the most accomplished legislative session in a generation?"

Consider where we are now and where we were two years ago, and compare them to where the standard benchmarks for Obama were (FDR, LBJ.) People are commenting that Afghanistan is this era's Vietnam. If that's the case, than Iraq is Vietnam Plus. The Great Recession, still not dispatched, is about a hair below the Great Depression. There's a strong case to be made that Bush was the worst environmental president since they started keeping track. These are very troubled times. People didn't expect Obama to be FDR, so much as need him to be FDR simply to solve these problems.

The stimulus package was one of, if not the biggest single spending package ever passed by the American legislature. It still fell short. The health care package is the biggest step towards universal health care since Medicare - and still isn't universal health care. FinReg doesn't break up the big banks and it still is going to clamp down on abuses and let sunlight into musty corners of the financial system. Drawing down troops in Iraq still leaves some behind for at least the next year, and there's still fighting in Afghanistan - dropping the list of "exceedingly questionable wars" down to one from two. (Think about how surreal that last sentence is.)

There's a strong case to be made that this is a steady stream of solid and productive and necessary legislation, the steadiest progressive agenda enacted since the Great Society - and it still isn't enough. That this is as good as it can get and it's still not going to solve that much. That the problems facing America are too damn big for even its government's best.

I know. It's depressing to think about, isn't it?