Tomorrow is exactly six months since Barack Obama moved into 1600 Pennsylvania. As an intellectual exercise I recently went back and watched three of his speeches, his victory speech from November, his inaugural address, and the not-State of the Union he gave to Congress. The first thing one notices is how much the presidency has already aged him, but beyond that he’s been remarkable consistent. With the big exception of civil liberties he’s largely done what he said he was going to do.
I figured it would be a good way to take stock of things, to put his still young Administration into some larger context, but I was wrong. The basic political situation in this country remains the same: health care, health care, health care. If he successfully reforms the way we pay for medicine there’s almost no limit to what he might accomplish. A simple as that formulation is it’s basically accurate and that makes it a frustrating time to be a casual political observer in this country.
Keeping tabs on the ins and outs of the health care debate would be almost a full time job, so gauging Obama’s actual chances is almost impossible. I don’t know whether or not he’s going to be able to pull this off, and neither does anyone else. We’ll just have to watch and see.
So here we are, six months in, and everything else is subsumed by the health care war. Financial regulation, for example, got a standing (bi-partisan) ovation when Obama spoke to Congress, but other than putting Goldman Sachs back in the black not much seems to have been done on that score. The energy bill, which realistically may be one of the most important things to ever come before Congress, is playing second fiddle and both of the wars are still killing Americans.
There isn’t anything really interesting to say and there’s no intelligent analysis to do so this post ended up being a hell of a lot shorter than I’d originally figured it would be. Obama’s presidency is pretty well understood, he’s been a tremendous improvement but there are still a lot of problems. Everything hinges on whether or not health care works and whether one chooses to look at things as glass-half-full or glass-half-empty is irrelevant. There is one thing that’s worth bearing in mind though, and that’s the fact that six months from now, the same span of time that’s passed so quickly, we’ll already be in an election year. Delaying the health care bill may or may not be necessary to get it passed, but it’s certainly necessary to get it defeated and six months can go by very fast.
