Obama One Year Later

In this issue of Mass Dissent we take a look, a year later, at the Obama administration. Many of us had great hopes, great expectations, and great energy when, first, Barack Obama made a serious run for the Democratic Party nomination, then when he won it; and at least some of us were ecstatic when he actually won the Presidency.

So, what do we say a year later?

First in this issue is Judy Somberg’s analysis of Obama’s foreign policy – perhaps the single area, because of candidate Obama’s Afghanistan rhetoric, about which progressives felt most uneasy. Judy’s article confirms our early doubts; though, to be fair, there is not now the raw, aggressive unilateralism that characterized the prior administration.

Next are articles on domestic policy. Guild friend Cathy Dunham writes on Obama’s health care reform efforts, explaining what progressives have advocated for, how short of that current undertakings have fallen, but why we should still be pleased with the administration’s efforts. Nadine Cohen writes on the administration’s faint efforts to help distressed homeowners, efforts she concludes have been an utter failure to date. Finally, Tony Benningfield writes on Obama’s efforts to support the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, another area where the new administration’s efforts have disappointed.

But we keep our perspective. We have an African-American President, and he has been in office only a year. His agenda has been strikingly ambitious – it has been almost two decades since any President took on health care – and it should not surprise us as well that it has been thoroughly centrist. But even that centrist agenda has unleashed a response from the right that must alarm us. It must be our mission to bring equal pressure from the left, and to realize, when all is said and done, that there is a much more compatible presence in the White House than we have seen in years. And as Tony suggests in his article, while our “friend” in the White House has not met all (or even most) of our hopes, the alternative to him is almost surely much worse.

- Tony Benningfield & David Kelston –