by Ben Rosenberg
Editor-in-Chief
    As he stepped into office on Jan. 21, 2009, President Obama was poised, ready to start his first day on the right foot. With universal health care, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and the Great Recession on his mind, Obama seemed to promise rapid reform. But at various points in his presidency he has started to drift off-track. Many people claim that very little has been accomplished, and Obama is now being scrutinized by members of both parties for what Rachel Maddow of MSNBC called a “distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions” over this past year. Let’s pump the brakes for a second.

  Obama has been in office for a year. One year! He’s only a quarter of the way through his term, and we are already talking about failed promises. Fox News claimed that “now’s a good time to take a look at [Obama’s] track record,” but give the man a break; he is just getting started.

    Fox News assessed Obama’s various promises, rating them as either “kept, partly kept, work in progress, not yet addressed [or] promise broken.” However, this rating system is unfair—you can only address Obama’s net product after four full years in office. He may not have worked out the kinks in his plans yet, and to be fair, he’s not expected to; that’s why his term is four years long, not one. Assessing Obama’s progress right now is like assessing a basketball team after the first quarter of a game—there is a lot of time left to change strategies and react to surprises. It is the end product, after a full four quarters, which dictates how the team played.

     This is not to say that Obama should not be held accountable—as president of the United States, it is his job to get things done. But isn’t it a little farfetched to say Obama has failed in some areas of his job? If anything, Obama has learned a lot about the proper ways to address certain topics; it is unreasonable to expect him to just know these things right off the bat. If nothing else, let’s step back for some perspective: it took FDR 30 years to reform the economy. Can’t we give Obama at least four?

(Sources: New York Times, Fox News)