Today begins either the second half of the Obama presidency or the end of the first quarter of the Obama presidency.
There are people on the right and the left who think both ways in terms of what is going to happen. Given my years of blogging and following politics I can definitely say this:
Who knows?
Two years ago this president was riding above the clouds, two months ago his party got pounded at the polls. Consider:
We have no idea what new crises will arise.
We don’t know how the republican congress is going to govern.
We don’t know who will win the battle between the tea party wing and the establishment wing of the party.
We don’t know how the democratic senate will act.
We don’t know if Iran will get the bomb…
…or how Israel will react
We don’t know what North Korea will do…
…or China….
…or Russia..
We don’t know if the president will govern in order to get re-elected…
…or to advance his beliefs
We don’t know the results of the Economic crisis in Greece…
Or Spain…
Or Ireland…
Or Portugal.
And we don’t know how the war will go and if the president will continue to try to win it.
None of these things are known and in fact there wasn’t a lot we knew two years ago. So what DO we know?
Only two things really, one that we already did two years ago and one we did not:
We’ve always known you can’t outlaw the business cycle, you can only mess it up a bit. That is and always was true.
What we DO know now that we didn’t before is how the president governs and how he acts in a crisis.
Two years ago a vast majority of the public (and the Nobel committee) projected their hopes on this president based only on what they felt having no idea how he would govern.
Now we have seen him in action. We know exactly how he has governed in a crisis. No person making a judgment in a democratic primary or in the general election in 2012 has any excuse for deceiving themselves.
Well Maybe Andrew Sullivan, don’t forget he thought the president deserved the Nobel Peace Prize when he was awarded it.
Past performance is not guarantee of future actions but it’s what we have, and we should judge accordingly.
Oh and one final thing we do know, the next two years won’t be boring.
Update: I hope you didn’t miss this at Nice Deb
Update 2: Stacy gives another example of how things can change in year.
Update 3: Instalanche via update! Thanks Glenn. Ironically this ‘Lanche brings to mind a post from December 2009 when Charles Johnson was 233 Instalanche’s up on me. It really illustrates Stacy’s point on how things change.
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