Left Right Left: Is President Obama Too Successful?

They say you can never be too rich or too thin. Now you can add too successful to that list as well.

I was surprised to read a cover story in “USA Today” this week in which the writers said that although President Obama’s aggressive legislative record during a crisis-tested presidency has quickly catapulted him into the league of predecessors such as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, his ambitious attempts to pull the country out of a financial crisis and two wars might actually carry huge political costs.

According to the piece, Obama’s push to pass sweeping financial regulations, a historic $940 billion health care overhaul as well as bailouts for U.S. automakers, the $862 billion financial bailout packages for banks, new strict credit card regulations, appointing two Supreme Court nominees, a new START arms reduction treaty with Russia, setting aside two million acres of public land as protected wilderness and the expansion of equal-pay protection for women has created skepticism among many voters who fear he’s doing too much, too soon.

House Republican leader John Boehner, a vocal Obama critic, called the president’s first 15 months “a nightmare” the he predicted would “cripple” the future of America’s children and grandchildren thanks to staggering debt.

As the technology and education gap with such emerging superpowers as India and China widens by the day and America’s financial superiority is threatened by the Great Recession, is now the time to punish our nation’s leader for burning the midnight oil to right the ship? Is the message we want to send to our children, “try hard, but not that hard.” Do we want them to think that if they work their hardest they will actually be punished?

Instead of holding up a president who rushed the country into a devastating war based on copied homework notes that turned out to be the wrong answers and who preferred clearing brush to hammering out hard compromises with his rivals, Republicans would have us believe that Obama is too ambitious and that his focused desire to tackle some of our country’s thorniest problems is reason enough to send him to defeat in the fall elections.

A USA Today poll found that 38 percent of those surveyed though Obama has done more than other presidents at the same stage in their administrations, while 37 percent said his achievements were “about the same” and 22 percent said he’d done less than predecessors. Really? About the same?

Obama’s record is impressive, but there are a myriad of other major pieces of legislation and changes he promised that he’s yet to crack the seal on: immigration reform, landmark environmental legislation, the repeal of the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy, restricting Bush-era warrantless wiretaps and the closing of Guantanamo Bay.

He’s also gone back on campaign pledges to hold open hearings on the health care legislation and to include a “public option” in the plan, as well as failing to support a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act which ensures that more than 1,100 federal legal rights and benefits provided to married straight couples would be extended to same-sex partners.

As a young father, I’m as scared as anyone about the trillions of dollars in debt we’re racking up that could very well cripple the U.S. economy down the line and leave my children and their children with a crushing mountain of IOU’s. But as a freelance writer whose very existence depends on a non-stop hustle to get work -- often at the expense of lazier writers who wait for work to drop into their laps, who fail to deliver on promises or prefer to complain about the industriousness of others rather than get off their asses and get busy – I know that hard work is its own reward.

Am I afraid President Obama is doing too much, too fast?

No, I’m scared that we’ve come to expect less from our leaders and that a country whose backbone was built by generations of strivers working 100-hour weeks to get ahead doesn’t expect as much from its commander-in-chief. I'm angry that ingenuity and focus are now targets of partisan bickering and griping.

Do you think President Obama is trying to get too much done?