Whaddaya Mean Obama Hasn’t Done Anything?

Published in Esquire by John H. Richardson

… Here’s the conventional wisdom in a single paragraph: Three hundred and sixty-four days after he was elected president, Obama is still stuck in Iraq, hasn’t closed Guantánamo, is getting deeper into Afghanistan, hasn’t accomplished health-care reform or slowed the rise in unemployment. His promises of bipartisanship are a punch line (see above). And there’s still no peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. What a failure! What a splash of cold water in the face of all our bold hopes!

But the conventional wisdom is insane. Consider the record:

A week before he was sworn in, Obama jammed part two of the bank bailout down the throat of his own party — a $350 billion accomplishment.

Two days after he was sworn in, Obama banned the use of “harsh interrogation” and ordered the closing of Guantánamo.

A day later, Obama reversed George W. Bush’s funding cutoff to overseas family planning organizations — saving millions of lives with the stroke of a pen.

Three days after that, Obama gave a green light to the California car-emissions standards that Bush had been blocking for six years — an important step on the road to cleaner air and a cooler planet.

Two weeks after that, Obama signed the stimulus bill — a $787 billion accomplishment.

Ten days after that, Obama formally announced America’s withdrawal from Iraq.

A week later — we’re in early March now — Obama erased Bush’s decision to restrict federal funding for stem-cell research.

In April and June, Obama forced Chrysler and GM into bankruptcy.

In June, Obama reset the tone of our relations with the entire Arab world with a single speech — an accomplishment that the Bush administration failed to achieve despite a series of desperate PR moves (anyone remember Charlotte Beers?) and a “public diplomacy” budget of $1 billion a year.

Also in June, Obama unveiled the “Cash for Clunkers” program, a “socialist” giveaway that reanimated the corpse of our car industry — leading, for example, to the billion-dollar profit that Ford announced on Monday.

I haven’t even mentioned Sonia Sotomayor, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the order to release the torture memos, Obama’s push for charter schools, his $288 billion tax cut, or the end of Bush’s war on medical marijuana. Or the minor fact that he seems to have — with Bush’s help, it must be said — stopped the financial collapse, revived the credit markets, and nudged the economy toward 3.5 percent growth in the last quarter.

Oh, and one more thing: President Obama is now a month or two from accomplishing the awesome and seemingly impossible task that eluded mighty presidents like FDR, LBJ, and WJC — health-care reform.

Obama’s early returns also include a host of remarkably cautious and prudent national-security decisions that seem, these days, to have been completely forgotten:

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