Report Card - Obama - F -

Mr. Obama is planning a spending freeze (except for the military) and that is bringing the critics out. As a teacher we periodically gave students grades or in later years held conferences with parents (once described by me a a place where teachers said what they needed to say and parents heard what they wanted to hear.) It seems like with the one year anniversary and State of the Union address it is time for the Conference. Here are two Conference reports

David Michael Green says:

And, speaking of ‘change', the one kind that Barack Obama did actually deliver this year was not that which most voters had in mind after listening to him use the word incessantly, all throughout 2008. Obama and his colleagues have now managed to bring the future of the Democratic Party into question, just a year after it won two smashing victories in a row.

Read the entire article at Common Dreams.

At the New York Times Bob Herbert asks, "Who is Barak Obama?"

Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.

Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted.

Read Obama's Credibility Gap here.

Personally he lost a part of me when he invited Rick Warren to give the prayer at the Inauguration. He reminds me of a passive aggressive enabler. Instead of the promise (change and hope) he is giving us Bush's third term. I doubt if he can recover... I will remain a Democrat until the Republicans wholly divest themselves of the religious wing nuts they allowed to take over the party but I am oh, so discouraged.