One year of Obama: Why most voters are disappointed

“Happy first anniversary, Barack Obama,” said Dick Polman in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Although ‘happy’ is probably the wrong word.” One year ago, amid a massive outpouring of goodwill, our first African-American president took the oath, promising to be “a transformational president who would cure our ills and cleanse our politics.” Today, nearly half of Americans say that Obama has not delivered on his big promises, and his approval rating has slipped from more than 70 percent to 46 percent in some polls. Only 39 percent say they’d vote for him again. As Obama himself has conceded, the country “has every right to be deflated,” said Sean Wilentz in the New York Daily News. His signature initiative, health-care reform, is now in tatters, the economy remains anemic, and there has been little measurable progress in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A year ago, Americans were buzzing about having elected “another Lincoln.” Today, Obama looks “less like a political messiah and more a victim of unrealistic expectations.”

Liberals blame Obama’s decline on “matters of style,” said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post, as if all would be well if he were not so coolly remote. But the reality is that Obama’s “social Democratic” agenda is just too liberal for most Americans. Voters are appalled by his “statist visions,’’ in which Big Government would radically restructure the health-care system, and dictate solutions on energy, the environment, and the economy. Obama promised bipartisanship and centrist pragmatism, said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. What he gave us were “party-line votes on 2,000-page bills,” massive federal spending, and “tone-deaf boasts about millions of jobs ‘created or saved,’ even as unemployment soared into double digits.”

Considering the disasters Obama inherited, said Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post, his presidency has been largely a success. “Begin with something that didn’t happen: financial collapse and great depression.” A year ago, the financial industry was imploding under the weight of trillions in bad debt. A global economic collapse was looming. Obama’s administration quickly implemented a series of rescues, stimulus spending, and regulatory reforms that halted the panicked meltdown, stabilized markets, and launched the recovery. On the foreign-policy front, he moved to extricate us from the mess in Iraq and devised a strategy for a decent outcome in Afghanistan, while quietly killing more than 400 al Qaida leaders with Predator strikes. All in all, it’s been a “frustrating year for those who want instant results,” said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. But if you take the “long view,” as Obama admirably does, it’s clear that this president will deliver intelligent, “game-changing” leadership.

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Then why don’t most Americans see it that way? said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Obama came into office with a deserved reputation for eloquence, yet on crucial issues all we’ve gotten are “workman-like utterances” that failed to create confidence and rally support. It’s true, said Eugene Robinson, also in the Post. Obama’s primary problem has been his puzzling failure to provide an effective answer to the Republicans’ powerful message machine. Remember, though, that Ronald Reagan’s approval ratings also sagged below 50 percent one year into his presidency; there is plenty of time for Obama to turn it around. But “if he is to achieve his goal of being a ‘transformational’ president like Reagan,” he’d better learn from his first year’s mistakes.