In the days following November’s midterm elections, left-wing Democrats were competing with right-wing Republicans to see who could write the most damning obit on Obama’s presidency. And who can blame them?
After all, the consensus opinion across party lines was that the shellacking the Democrats took was in fact a referendum on his presidency. And that the only thing left for Obama to do was to survive the ensuing lame-duck session of Congress, as well as the “lame-duck final two years” of his presidency, without Republican-fueled cognitive dissonance turning him into a black Jimmy Carter.
Well, what a difference a few weeks and a few milestone pieces of legislation make. For instead of retreating to the White House to lick his wounds, Obama mounted an aggressive campaign to get vanquished Democrats to take bold action during this peculiar interregnum (between November when they lost power in the House and January when they will finally be obliged to relinquish that power).
The result of course was what Obama himself described last week, quite proudly and properly, as “the most productive lame-duck session since World War II.”
This remarkable session was highlighted by the belated ratification of START (reducing the number of nuclear weapons held by the U.S. and Russia), repeal of DADT (allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military), passage of a major tax compromise (extending unemployment benefits and granting tax relief for middleclass as well as rich folks), passage of a bill providing health benefits to Ground Zero responders (allowing them to get the medical treatment and workers’ compensation that, incomprehensibly, they had been denied for over eight years), and passage of another food safety bill as the icing on the cake.
What is truly remarkable about these accomplishments, however, is the extent to which pundits and supporters alike are propagating the fiction that, but for them, Obama’s presidency would have been a failure. After all, Obama had already amassed an enviable record of accomplishments, which led him to describe the 111th Congress that enacted his agenda items as “the most productive Congress in decades.”
These accomplishments include a stimulus package (pulling the U.S., if not the world economy, from the precipice of another Great Depression), bailout of the auto industry (saving it from imminent and terminal collapse), landmark healthcare reform (providing health insurance to over 30 million Americans and prohibiting adhesive insurance practices), financial regulation (overhauling the financial industry for the first time in generations – complete with a consumer bureau to protect borrowers against abuses in mortgage, credit card and other types of lending), the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act (launching a new era of national service and volunteerism), the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (making it easier for women to sue for equal pay), the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP – providing health, dental and vision coverage to poor children), easing restrictions on stem cell research, appointing the first Hispanic, Sonia Sotomayor, to the Supreme Court, and student-loan reform (making the government, not loan-sharking commercial banks, the originator of student loans), just to name a few.
Given this, one can only conclude that the results of November’s so-called referendum stemmed far more from the prevailing ignorance and myopia of the American electorate (enabled to be sure by Tea-Party propaganda) than from any fair or objective assessment of Obama’s presidency.
In any case, nothing will ensure Obama’s reelection in 2012 quite like Republicans following through on their threat to do everything in their power to make him a one-term president. For I am convinced that the vast majority of Democrats and Independents – who were either too disinterested or disaffected to vote in these midterm elections – will not allow this cynical Republican strategy of obstruction and nullification to be vindicated.
Not to mention that in 2012 even Tea-Party zealots will probably think twice about rejecting this transformative president and all of his salutary accomplishments, in favor of a Republican president whose agenda amounts to little more than providing tax cuts for the rich and scapegoating the Hispanics they hire as domestic servants.
NOTE: Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh is the conservative pied-piper who declared – just days after Obama was inaugurated – that “I want to see him fail.” And he has been relentless ever since in his efforts to rally his ditto heads to this unpatriotic cause.
But nothing demonstrates what a big, fat, gas bag of irrelevant banter he is quite like Obama having the most successful first two years of any president in U.S. history despite his efforts.
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