http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Ezra Klein asks a compelling question on what Obama could have done during his Presidency. it is an article that seems to be tailor made to address opinions that have shot back and forth at DKos in the last few years.
As Jon Chait says, the New York Times tried to run a feature in which they “asked a range of Americans who don’t labor in politics or the media what they’d do if they were president” and returned with a feature in which an range of wealthy and accomplished Americans explained what they would do if they were king. They didn’t explain what they would do if they were president and had to persuade Congress to do things in order to get anything done.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways in which the past few years could have gone differently. I’ve even come up with a few. But none of them lead to dramatically better outcomes today.
In the end he states
Indeed, if you had taken me aside in 2008 and sketched out the first three years of Obama’s presidency, I would have thought you were being overoptimistic: an $800 billion stimulus package — recall that people were only talking in the $200-$300 billion range back then — followed by near-universal health-care reform, followed by financial regulation, followed by another stimulus (in the 2010 tax deal), followed by the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” followed by the killing of Osama bin Laden and the apparent ousting of Moammar Gaddafi? There was no way. And yet all that did get done. But the administration hasn’t able to get unemployment under control — perhaps it couldn’t have gotten unemployment under control — and so all of that has not been nearly enough.
There is a follow up article to responses he got here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...