Is Obama a Great President?

     Certainly, if you read me regularly, you know there's no bigger fan of the President than the writer of this blog. Having said that, even I realize that it's dangerous-for the Obama team itself-to get caught up in such questions at the start of the second term.

   However, we as voters, supporters, and pundits are free to indulge. I do think it's too early to worry about this. Right now it's like Nike says just do it time. I do think that following his strong inauguration speech in favor of liberalism-it was the most defiantly liberal speech spoken by a President in many generations, perhaps you have to go back to LBJ for anything comparable; Carter and Clinton presided over periods when liberalism was much more on the defensive-he is very well positioned to get his priorities done in a second term. That's where the focus should be.

  As Bill Kristol admitted on Fox the Sunday after November 6, elections have consequences, and the Republicans are going to have to compromise and cave to the President a lot more than they might think right then.

  What was really illusionary was when Boehner had insisted that the GOP would be even more implacably unwilling to work with the President in a second term. This has already been shown to be wishful thinking. Just look at what's happened regarding the fiscal cliff, Sandy Aid, and the debt ceiling.

   Legislation will move through the Senate working with the White House and then get rammed through the House with near unanimous Democratic support and small but sufficient Republican support.

   This shows you Obama has a mandate. As has been pointed out, the GOP still has a decent margin in the House so why should this term be any different? Because it's not just numbers, it's the mandate. In 2011 Obama was a weakened President who the GOP felt emboldened to obstruct at every turn.

   They used the Hastert Rule which gave the House and outsized ability to control the debate with the Democrats holding onto the Senate and White House. Now GOPers are saying goodbye to the Hastert Rule.

    In any case, some are already using the G-word-declaring the President great.

     "This time about 12 years from now, President Tagg Romney will, with a mixture of exasperation and amusement, begin signing into law an unending series of symbolic measures: The legislation renaming post offices, airports, federal buildings, parks, warships, overseas bases, drone flotillas, and more after the sainted former President Barack Obama."

    "Obama's partisans would have made a case for his greatness even if he had only been a one-term president: The symbolism of his race; the era-ending slaying of Bin Laden; the sweep of health care legislation; the success in avoiding the abyss of the financial crisis. But there would have been a good case, too, for treating him as an interesting footnote of a president: He cleaned up George W. Bush's messes, but went too far. The Affordable Care Act was a bit of an over-reach, swiftly repealed; the recovery credited to President Romney."

     "Now we are in Reagan territory, and in the hall of statues in the American imagination that includes, this century, probably only FDR and maybe JFK and Teddy besides. Obama's best interpreter, Andrew Sullivan, made that case last fall: "If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats' Reagan. The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure who struggled through a recession and a terrorized world, reshaping the economy within it, passing universal health care, strafing the ranks of al -Qaeda, presiding over a civil-rights revolution, and then enjoying the fruits of the recovery."

     "Sullivan predicts, "Reagan status (maybe minus the airport-naming)." Actually, Midway, named for the Pacific battle, is pretty much waiting for a presidential name to be attached.
The soaring rhetoric of inauguration provokes, in many political writers and analysts, the understandable temptation to puncture the rhetorical balloon at its most inflated. For some conservatives, that means noting Obama's relative unpopularity; for others, it means simply declaring his victories hollow."

     "But you can also feel the way the country's imagination is turning, and see Republican pragmatists begin to reposition themselves around it. Matthew Continetti, a talented conservative reporter-turned-polemicist, didn't hide his distaste about echoing Sullivan in the Free Beacon last week."

    "We ought to face the unpleasant fact that Obama will be remembered as a president of achievement and consequence," he wrote. "It does not matter if, like I do, you think those achievements are horrible and that their consequences will be worse. Obama's reversal of the Reagan revolution is here."

Continetti urged Republicans to reconcile themselves to this reality:
"The generation of conservatives and Republicans who return one day to power will be forced to reckon with the consequences of the Obama revolution, just as a generation of defeated liberals were forced to confront and in some cases accept the revolution of Ronald Reagan."

     http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/obama-becomes-a-great-president

     I think the Reagan comparison is very apt and more than a "great" President" I'd like to talk about the idea that Obama is a transformational President-just as Reagan was.

     Many liberals took objection for Obama's invoking Reagan in the past, including Krugman. Yet on this one he missed the point:

      "In the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama scandalized Democrats with warm words for Reagan, particularly surprising from a man who wasn't from his party's New Democratic wing but had come up on a left shaped by hatred of the Republican icon."

      "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," Obama said. "He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

     "This drew a furious rejoinder from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who accused Obama, accurately but perhaps missing the point, of rewriting history."

      Obama's point was to be a transformational President like Reagan was but in the opposite direction, back to more regard for government, with respect for it's legitimate role in the country.

      Continetti is certainly right as was Krauthammer yesterday after Obama's speech. The President has declared the Reagan Revolution over. I was only 10 when that revolution started. I can tell you, I won't miss it.

      Welcome to the next 4 years. The future's so bright, we're going to have to wear shades.