[Xantar]

Ok, it's been a hard day at work, so I'll bite.

1. Escalated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Actually, just Afghanistan. Iraq is winding down. And Obama had always campaigned on escalating the war in Afghanistan. Besides,

2. Less gun restrictions

How so? Because the Supreme Court ruled in a DC court case that the 2nd Amendment gives an individual right to bear arms? That wasn't Obama's doing.

3. Right-wing healthcare reform that extends no government programs, and only benifits the private industry.

I'm not sure what other alternative you wanted, but pretty much no other health care reform plan was going to pass Congress. I'll try to break it down, but understand that I'm going to gloss over a whole lot of stuff here.

Do you like the fact that insurance companies deny coverage to people for pre-existing conditions? Do you want to prevent them from doing that? Well, the fact is covering people for pre-existing conditions DOES cost more (many insurance companies abuse the policy, but that doesn't mean the basic economic fact is untrue). So if you force companies to take people with pre-existing conditions, they will raise premiums.

How do you prevent that? You expand the pool of insured people and get as many healthy people insured as possible so that their premiums cover sicker people. The best way to do that is by a mandate.

But what if you mandate coverage for people who can't afford it? That's why you now have subsidies for people earning below a certain amount.

Now if you don't want to benefit the insurance industry at all, then you could just institute Single Payer at one fell swoop. But that was never going to pass Congress, and the inconvenient fact many liberals ignore is that doing such a thing would put tens upon thousands of people out of work. Instituting something that sudden just isn't a good idea. It took Canada quite a long time to develop their health care system.

4. An extension of the Patriot Act

Is it possible that there are some parts of the USA PATRIOT Act that are actually good for fighting terrorism and that the best thing to do is not to scrap it altogether but to amend it? I don't actually know the answer to that question for sure, but Obama's argument seemed to be that we didn't need to throw out all the useful stuff just because there was potential for abuse.

5. Campaign finance reform that benifits the rich more

How so? Unless you're talking about the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United case. But again, that's something Obama had no control over.

6. No Justice for Bush/Cheney breaking international laws

Besides the fact that there's no political will for it, I think you should keep in mind that it's only been a year since Bush and Cheney left office. But mostly, I would say that the American public just isn't interested in going after Cheney for any crimes he may have committed in office. Obama is not the king.

7. No fight against companies that evade tax laws

Not true. I work for a tax law firm. We are getting a lot of work right now because the IRS is actively going after foreign bank accounts. It has hired hundreds to thousands of investigators (accountants, lawyers, that kind of thing) in order enforce taxes. This isn't covered by the media, but any tax professional who follows what's going on can see it.

8. No tax cuts for the middle class

Yeah there was. I could see it in my own paycheck.

9. Great speeches

10. Increased Spending - (Everyone who actually looks into it knows that 1.2 trillion of the deficit was created by failed policies under republican leadership. But Obama didn't help.)

Depends on the time frame you're looking at. In this one year, it's true that Obama increased the deficit. Over the next five years will the deficit go up or down? And will it have changed more or less than it would have if Obama had done nothing? We just don't know that yet. There are ways for very smart economists to figure that out, but they don't have the data yet.

You have to keep two things in mind about Obama:

1. He's a former community organizer and
2. He's a politician.

#1 means that he will almost never talk tough because he is not interested in bashing people. He's interested in getting results. Right now, his best asset is the American public views him as reasonable, moderate, and trying to be bipartisan (this isn't just my opinion. The polls bear this out). If you watch him carefully, you will see that he likes to say a lot of stuff about how he hopes to be bipartisan while at the same time not raising too much of a fuss when his policies are voted on in Congress along strictly partisan lines.

Which brings us to #2. Obama is a politician which means you cannot take everything he says at face value. It's not so much that he lies (although sometimes he will be misleading) as that he only says things that aren't going to get him in trouble with the media. Take the bipartisanship talk again. A lot of liberals like to bash him because they don't understand why he would continue to try to seek bipartisan support for his programs when it's clear Republicans will never go along. The thing is the moment Obama says, "All right, you Republicans are just being silly obstructionists. I'm going without you" the media would blare headlines saying, "Obama gets tough!" or "He's being partisan all of a sudden! What happened to change we can believe in?"

If you haven't been turned off politics already, I encourage you to pay very close attention to Obama. By that I mean watch his favored legislation moving around at the committee level. Check out the little changes in rules and regulations at various agencies he's implementing. Or if you're too busy for that, find some good bloggers who do that sort of thing and read from them. I think what you'll find is that Obama is definitely making very huge changes in the country in ways that liberal Democrats will like and Republicans will not like (whether conservatives will like it too depends on your definition of conservative).