The problem that has afflicted Academia for decades has now moved to the White House: grade inflation. When Oprah Winfrey asked Barack Obama to grade his first year in office, to which Obama replied, a “good, solid B-plus.” Jake Tapper covers the story for ABC, while a local Fox affiliate in Rhode Island has a good roundtable discussion. Click the first image to watch:
On her Christmas in Washington special on ABC last night, Oprah Winfrey asked President Obama to grade himself.
“Good, solid B-plus,” the president said.
Explaining, he said, “we have inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“We stabilized the economy, and prevented possibilities of a Great Depression or a significant financial meltdown. The economy is growing again.
“We are on our way out of Iraq. I think we’ve got the best possible plan for Afghanistan.
“We have reset our image around the world.[“]
First, as one of the commentators notes in the clip, Obama doesn’t get to grade himself. That comes from the electorate, which will use the academically-nicknamed midterm elections as its first opportunity to grade Obama and his agenda. So far, the indications are that Obama is about to get a big failure notice, and the march of Democratic retirement suggests that some of Obama’s school buddies are already aware of that.
If anything, Obama gets an incomplete. His legislative agenda is still stuck at his first project, health-care reform. Obama himself has basically shoved responsibility for this shared project onto his lab partners Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, showing up only to do classroom presentations and hog the credit. Cap-and-trade has fallen off the table altogether. And only belatedly did Obama return to the issue that most concerns his actual graders, jobs.
And on math, Obama gets a big, red F. After all, it was his team that missed the 10-year deficit projection by over 22% and two trillion dollars. His Porkulus project was supposed to result in limiting unemployment to 8%, and his estimate that it would reach as high as 9% without out the stimulus turned out to be wildly incorrect.
Hot Air readers are more qualified to grade Obama than Obama himself. After all, he works for all of us. What kind of grade would you give Obama?
Update: Added the link to the video clip from the interview, courtesy of Mediaite and Allahpundit.
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