Obama needs to learn from first year

It’s a little over a year since the Obama administration came to power, and it seems like it’s finally getting the hang of things. In the past year, it’s bobbed and weaved through jabs from the Tea Party people and also took some below-the-belt shots from the GOP, but it looks as if the White House is far from ready to throw in the towel.

Within just a few weeks of the inauguration it brought its focus back on jobs, pushed back on those who are playing politics with terrorism and even took House Republicans for a nauseating ride on national television.

One thing that it really missed the mark on last year, was controlling the health care debate. Because of the process that it chose to take, the White House was very reactive, and not proactive throughout much of the year. People fear what they don’t understand, so by letting the opposition define its key domestic initiative in order to confuse people, the administration was really hurt in the long run. And after the recent victory by Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., every pundit, both Democrat and Republican, claimed that the casket on health care reform was closed and ready to be put in the ground. But, last week the administration seemed to push back on the notion that health care reform was dead by announcing a bipartisan health care summit that will at least keep the debate afloat to give it time to figure this thing out.

Even though these are encouraging signs, this administration is still taking some notable missteps that need to be addressed. In the State of the Union address, President Barack Obama announced a three-year spending freeze on non-security discretionary spending. Yes, this might sound good politically, but in order to really fix the deficit, entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would have to be the target. This is something that is highly doubtful, so most likely any attempts to fix these programs will be kicked down the road just like almost every other administration before this one.

There are other issues that this administration seems to be stumbling with, such as finding a way to get the banks to start lending again to small businesses. The government can throw all the money it wants at small businesses, but it’s the banks that have to give in as well. Financial regulatory reform was also something that should have been pushed much more than it was. Less than two years ago most people thought the entire financial system was going to collapse and everyone was in this feverish pitch, scared to death of the future. Now that it looks like the economy has somewhat stabilized, financial regulatory reform is pushed to the back burner.

These issues are not going away and, if not addressed, they do not bode well for the administration in the future. But, it at least seems like the administration is getting better at taking control and charge of issues that were unnecessarily fumbled in the past.

Posted by Ian Bridgeforth on Feb 12 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry