The disppointment that is Barack Obama

After sucking up to him for way too long, treating him as if he were the second coming of JFK (remember that Brian Williams' series on NBC News that was essentially a love letter to the President and his family?), we're finally getting some serious criticism of America's 44th, as evidenced by this Newsweek article written by Michael Hirsh.

It's about time that this happened. As the mainstream media (and the so-called "progressive" blogosphere) fawned over Mr. Obama, they allowed a shadow narrative to take over that depicted the man as a Muslim, a non-American, a Communist, a Nazi, and everything else under the sun. That is to say, by failing to provide reasonable and measured criticism, they opened up a vacuum for a much more pernicious form of criticism.

But Mr. Hirsh get many things right here. The best points come at the end of the article:

There was so much passion and ambition in Obama’s words about fixing the economy [when taking office], and so much dispassion and caution in his policy choices. Early in the Democratic primaries, in January 2008, Obama had stunned many of his supporters by praising Reagan as a transformational president—a contrast to the eight years of Bill Clinton, Obama added cuttingly. Reagan, Obama said, “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Yet at what would seem to be a similar historical inflection point—what should have been the end of Reaganism, or deregulatory fervor—President Obama seemed unprepared to address the deeper ills of the financial system and the economy. Several officials who have worked with the Obama team said the president’s heart was in health care above all else. “He didn’t run for president to fix derivatives,” says Greenberger. “And when he brought in Summers and Geithner, he just thought he was getting the best of the best”—good financial mechanics, in other words, who would “get the car out of the ditch,” to use one of Obama’s favorite metaphors.

...

All of these challenges required a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. and global economy. Yet those who were most aligned with the “progressive” side of the Wall Street reform issue remained, for the most part, on the outside of the administration looking in. Among them were Brooksley Born, the former chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Summers and Geithner, by contrast, had been acolytes of Bob Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who, along with then–Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, had presided over many of the key deregulatory changes in the ’90s. And they convinced Obama that the financial system they themselves had done so much to nurture was, on the whole, fine. As long as there were greater capital reserves, leverage limits, and more regulatory oversight, Wall Street could remain intact.

The thing is that anyone who was looking at the issues seriously at the time could see that Mr. Obama was pushing for health care reform at exactly the wrong time. Remember how he wanted the bill passed by the end of summer '09? He pushed way too far in the wrong direction while the dissident voices of the unemployed and underemployed grew stronger.

Health care reform is seriously needed in America (and it still is, since the bill that did pass was so flawed). Yet, in the midst of such a great economic crisis, it could have waited. If Mr. Obama had gone on television and said, "Look, I know I promised you health care reform, but the economy is in the gutter, so we need to deal with that so you can get working again," I guarantee you that 99.9% of the population would have agreed with him.

Now we have a flawed health care bill, a rather feckless financial reform bill, an economy that is still in the doldrums, and a president that has spent a huge amount of political capital to achieve little. Not impressive.