What has he done?

Barack Obama, one term president. Some readers will rejoice, some will lament, but early signs point to this president joining that unfortunate list. He’s a unique case in so many ways in the history of the American president. Expectations for the man were somehow both exceedingly high and pessimistically low at the same time. In the same year, he has been compared to Kennedy and FDR, as well as Stalin and Hitler. In the latest bit of strange Obama news, he has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace. This despite the voting taking place in February when he had hardly been in office for two weeks. To put this in a bit of context, there were three previous American presidents who have earned the prestigious award: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter. Roosevelt won for negotiating the peace treaty to end the war between Russia and Japan, Wilson for being the architect of the League of Nations, and Carter for his numerous global charities.  In many ways, this award is a microcosm of the early Obama presidency thus far.

 The Nobel committee is representative of one of the two groups that are creating the rather unique set of circumstances around this president. In essence, one group has already beatified Obama into presidential sainthood creating an impossibly high standard for him to live up to. The American media, liberals and left leaning independents, civil rights organizations, environmentalists, and many European news outlets all fall into this first category.  What many of these people don’t realize is that in Obama’s many speeches and appearances, he was setting long term goals and plans. He was thinking in terms of decades, they are thinking in terms of months to a year. On the opposite side of this coin is the conservative attack machine. Conservatives, religious groups, many corporate interests, and , of course, Fox News are all aligned against the president and simply need to use his supporters’ lofty expectations against him. Anyone that has a clear checklist of goals is easy to attack for the ones he won’t have accomplished in four years. Since Clinton’s election the rancor between the parties has seemed to only get worse, and Obama has been under fire since the day after his inauguration.

 I always said that I could never be elected to public office because I would tell people that I can’t fix anything worth fixing overnight, that the things they want cost money and they need to be willing to shoulder the cost, and that anyone who tells them otherwise is a liar and a fraud.  In this instantaneous gratification culture we now suffer through, it seems that first tenant is the problematic one. People continuously ask, “What has he done?” That singular inquisition will be the epitaph on the headstone of this one term presidency. Is it justified? Consider that in George W Bush’s first 8 months in office he had not been able to get any of his initiatives passed, had a Senator leave the party on his watch, and already made one of his frequent trips to the Crawford ranch (this one to tackle that pesky stem cell research problem). His major campaign promise, the No Child Left Behind Act, wasn’t signed into law until Jan. of 2002. In Bill Clinton’s first year, he signed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 which allows people to take a leave of absence from their job for medical emergency or to care for a sick family member or newborn without fear of losing their job. However, he also couldn’t deliver on his promise of integrating the armed forces with respect to sexual orientation and, instead, settled on the compromise of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. Both of these presidents have supporters who can point to many successes over the course of their terms. Neither had overwhelming first years on the job. Neither was crushed under the weight of “What has he done?”

 Honestly, I can’t tell how the Obama presidency will turn out 3 years from now. I think we should wait until he has a record to judge before we begin to cast aspersions or worry about what he hasn’t accomplished yet. By the end of year two, one can really see the shape a person’s presidency will take, and by year three many of those campaign promises will start to be checked off the list. However, if by then we are all still wondering why he is winning awards and when we’ll finally see him do something, then all the criticism will have been justified.