My feelings about Obama’s first year in office are complicated. I worked on the campaign, both during the primary and the general election, so I have a ridiculously detailed knowledge of what Obama’s proposals were. And he’s not doing a bad job of living up to them- according to Politifact’s “Obameter” (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/), Obama has kept far more promises than he’s broken.

But there’s a problem with that. Before the economy blew up in everyone’s face right before the election, Barack Obama was the man for the moment. He was conciliatory, he seemed serious about bipartisanship, and he was a thoughtful incrementalist that had the ability not only to know the right direction to take the country, but the negotiating chops to actually get it done.

Then, the economy blew up, and the stakes became much higher. We no longer needed an incrementalist at all- we needed someone willing to apply bold solutions to unprecedented problems, and to build an entirely different framework for our economy, not based on thin air, but actually making things.

Obama was never going to be that person, and unfortunately, that’s what America needs right now. The problems with his approach are best illustrated by his response to the financial crisis.
After the banking meltdown and subsequent bailout, Obama had both the political capital and the political will borne of an angry electorate to enact meaningful financial reform. He could have used the leverage created by the bailout to put real limits on the risks banks can take with other people’s money, and he could have put a real dent in the patently false notion that an unregulated financial system is good for the economy, much less anything else.

He did not. He let that moment get away from him, and there is already an emerging counter-narrative on the right which suggests that more deregulation of the banks- more of the same thing that led us to this mess in the first place- is the answer.

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The result? Investment banks are now considering doing the same thing with life insurance policies that they did with home mortgages, buying and selling and cutting them up and multiplying them over and over again with fuzzy math, essentially placing bets on people dying early, ensuring a bigger payoff. And there is no new regulatory framework which would prevent them from doing this– from creating another pile of artificial money based on nothing but an algorithm crunching numbers.

Moreover, when Obama proposed the stimulus, he made far too many concessions to Republicans in the first test of his famed negotiation skills. He gave away far too much, in terms of tax cuts versus money for direct and immediate job creation, and received exactly nothing, not one Republican vote, in return.

To me, this is a clear failure of the approach that I really believed was the best for America when I signed up to work for Obama’s campaign. However, I cannot deny that Obama is one hundred percent the man I worked and voted for, and for all that I feel he could do better, there is something valuable in that.

Yes, Obama will work as hard as he can to keep the promises he made to the American people. I believe this year has proved that. Even the things he said that I was convinced were complete boilerplate at the time, like promising to reform health care within his first year in office, may actually come to pass. Whether the promises he made will be enough to build an America that is capable of lasting prosperity in the 21st century remains to be seen.

Newspaper by Matthew Gerring