That depends. I would say yes, and no. Or, it's too early to say for sure. Sorry to hedge, but...
If you pay attention to the mainstream media, the Associated Press, the chain papers and the broadcast networks, they are already trying to paint Obama as a failed president, so we can get on with the next campaign with Sarah Palin. Somehow that feeds the perceived American demand for sensational news and immediacy.
Is it something about her Tina Fey glasses? I don't know.
I don't know if the American people are nearly as focused on instant gratification as the media, but it does seem to be a trait of our society.
It has only been a year since we got rid of Bush. Y'all remember W, the worst president in history, right?
So yeah, we got change. We got rid of the corporate Republican cabal running the country into the ground.
Science is back in the balance and religion is not so important, so yeah, we got change on that front too.
Is Obama moving fast enough on all fronts to satisfy every liberal groups' demands and all the promises of the campaign? No, of course not.
But remember, it took eight years for Clinton-Gore to balance the budget and get our economy back on track. Remember the peace dividend?
I would say the best change we've seen so far shows up where the Obama administration immediately rolled back some of Bush's worst policies on science and environment, especially the move by the Environmental Protection Agency to get tougher on smog from power plants. We can't get them to move fast enough to come down hard on our lax state environmental agency here, especially on this big, bad coal ash disaster in Tennessee with the toxic fly ash being shipped by freight train load after freight train load to a landfill in the poor Black Belt region of Alabama. That is a major national story that has not been covered enough.
This administration is at least trying to pass health care reform, although it is pretty obvious we are not going to get everything promised in the first go-round. But if the Democrats can pass a bill to begin regulating the health care industry, to start the work of containing rising costs, any progress there is good.
Perhaps they should have started with a simple law to ban private insurance companies from denying people coverage for pre-existing conditions. That one provision would constitute change and progress.
Of course I would like to see a single-payer national government health care plan as many on the left want. That would be the best solution, and I think we will get it eventually. If not, our economy is never going to fully recover. Rising health care costs are a big part of the problem, and it is clear the Republicans have no plan to even begin to deal with that.
On the war front, there's good news and bad. We do seem to be gradually pulling out of Iraq, but maybe we should not have escalated in Afghanistan. But Obama was clear about his intentions there during the campaign. Getting control of the situation in Pakistan is not going to be easy or done over night.
One of the most disappointing departures from campaign promises so far by this administration has been on the issue of transparency and national security, and in the area of security verses liberty.
The administration is moving to close Gitmo and to try the prisoners from Cuba, rather than holding them indefinitely without due process. But the process is not moving fast enough for some on the left, while the president gets hammered from the right for making any progress on that front.
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