Obama: One year on

Obama vs. Bush

One year ago, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. He succeeded the administration of George Bush Jnr. which, by the time it had come to the end of its second term, was battered, bruised and in the midst of one of the worst economic crisis in living memory.

Just like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Obama had inherited a country in a severe recession. And just like FDR, Obama finished his campaign with promises of a tougher stance on greedy bankers and that the profits of the few would no longer preside over the well being of the many.

But after his first year in office, the jury is still out as to whether Obama really is speaking out from the trenches against corporate America among his fellow Americans, or whether his reliance on Wall Street fat cats for his next load of campaign cash will mean his bark is far worse than his bite.

Deficit quadrupled

President Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. However, as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl points out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious.

Obama has had to spend big. When he arrived in office he explained how he felt it was investments in infrastructure that have historically proven successful in driving a country out of recession. But even before his $787 billion stimulus package could even reach infrastructure, it had to offload around $438 billion for tax cuts, local and state government aid and citizen relief (i.e. food stamps, unemployment insurance, housing assistance etc.). But without the stimulus cash, the nation's economic infrastructure would have collapsed.

The deficits Obama has accumulated during the first quarter of his first term are all down to spending, and largely picking up from where Bush left off.

Creativity and mobilization is needed

For example, President Bush expanded the federal budget by a historic $700 billion through 2008. President Obama would add almost another $1 trillion.

President Bush became the first President to spend 3 percent of GDP on federal antipoverty programs. President Obama had already in­creased this spending by 20 percent by last March.

Barack Obama is a reform President committed to improving the lives of the American people and reconstructing the nation as a whole, but a year down the line what cannot be argued is that we remain a long way from building a new order and reshaping the prevailing landscape of American politics (and economics for that matter).

Greater strategic creativity and mobilization is needed, as pointed out by TheNation.com, and even though many considerable structural obstacles lie in place, Obama does now have the political space in which to push for the necessary reforms.

There are more pressing problems than others, such as establishing a much more robust jobs program, but the Obama administration has had to embrace the darkness before the dawn.

Related Articles:

"Too big to fail" | State of a nation | Overhaul spells trouble for US

Like this article? Get the RSS feed: