Obama on his first term: Gandhi and Mandela knew that real change takes time

Via the Washington Free Beacon. On the one hand, it’s the rare leader who’d presume to compare his agenda, tacitly or not, to Gandhi’s or Mandela’s. On the other hand, he is the fourth-most accomplished president of all time. So far.

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Which grand Gandhi-an ambitions does O want to achieve with four more years? He got his biggest big-ticket domestic agenda item passed halfway through his first term and pulled the remaining troops in Iraq out late last year, so the animating concerns of his 2008 campaign have already been addressed. The two big issues looming after 2012 are Iran, which is so intractable a crisis that no president really “wants” to tackle it, and entitlement reform, from which The One has run screaming every time it’s come up, and neither of those mesh easily with the “Change” platform. So what’s the big argument for keeping him in place? Granted, there’s no big argument either for electing Mitt Romney, but then Romney doesn’t go around framing his program as something so grand that it warrants Mandela comparisons. The hard truth is that, even in a best-case scenario for Democrats, there’ll still be a significant GOP minority in the Senate capable of filibustering any radical new Obama measures, so really the most compelling argument to an undecided to keep O in place is to preserve gridlock. If you like ObamaCare, for whatever strange reason, then reelecting him is the surest way of protecting it from being repealed; indeed, a second term is far more likely to be filled with vetoes than with signing bold new progressive measures into law. Not so Change-y, but probably the best you can hope for if you’re a leftist while waiting for new vacancies to open up on the Supreme Court.

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