80 percent of success is just showing up?
Time’s Mark Halperin Grades Obama’s First Incomplete Year
Oh, come on. On one hand you know they’re desperate to give him the A. On the other hand, you can’t believe they’d actually do it.
They did it. A minus, baby! (See, we’re not just over-the-moon schoolgirl crush partisan hacks! We gave him the minus, too! We’re “balanced”!)
Instantly comfortable and highly skilled at the hardest job in the world — proving his supporters’ contention that all the traits that made him a great candidate would serve him well in the White House……
A handful of public missteps (particularly on his international trips and on torture issues) and a failure to ameliorate the partisan divide are the only true blemishes so far.
$1.4 trillion dollar deficit this year and $2 trillion next year and thereafter we’ll get to halving the deficit down to a very manageable trillion per year.
A-.
Oh, and he hasn’t accomplished a single campaign promise, and has either reneged on, or is paving the way to repudiate, almost every promise he made.
A-.
17% real unemployment rate.
A-.
Iran’s about to get the bomb, and, given Obama’s plan, in a couple of years so might Al Qaeda.
A-.
As Tom Maguire says, I shudder to think what a “B” would have looked like.
In July, Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff wrote the following mythological passage about team Obama’s relationship with the legacy media:
They have been handed a most remarkable historical moment—in which they get to remake the media in their own image. They have the power and they are the subject. These people in this White House are in greater control of the media than any administration before them.
In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken wrote, “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.”
But then, such old-fashioned thinking is sooo 2007.
Update: The Rhetorican spots the inherent racism in such a low grade. Meanwhile, via Hot Air, Free Republic notes the paucity of appearances the notoriously camera shy Obama has made in Time, even before his inauguration:
Join the conversation as a VIP Member