Obama at 200

From Zanecorpwiki

Transparency

In my last assessment of President Obama, I focused mainly on the failure of the administration to live up to his promises on--in my opinion the most important and fundamental question of--transparency.

In a major change from the Bush era policy of the US can do no wrong, the Obama administration has begun to own up to mistakes of the past. The administration has admitted that raids killing dozens of civilians in Afghanistan were a mistake, as well as admitting the widely known but ever denied US involvement in the 1953 Iran coup in which the US helped overthrow a democratically elected government and ham-handedly undercut our long term interests in the region in exchange for superficial short term gains.

Biden misses easy transparency ops.

Finance Reform

I love Obama's proposed changes to the financial system. Like many of who criticize the plan for not going far enough and wax nostalgic about Roosevelt's Depression era reforms, I would emlike/em to see more. However, unlike the myopic policy wonks, I don't the cynical pragmatist label they apply. This is a very different time, a very different crisis, and there's lots of other stuff going on. Sweeping change is much easier when you're following on a multi-year long complete collapse of the entire economy. The Great Depression was orders of magnitude worse than our credit crisis. Not only is calling for a similar change of scale unrealistic, it's also ill advised. I'd like more, but Obama's pretty close.

On the other side of the coin, there's plenty of complaints about the plan itself. Yet only a few places like the oft and easily discredited Heritage Foundation think the plan is bad; and even they see some good points. All in all, I take it as a very good sign that no one's really happy because it means it's doing enough to piss off the people that should be pissed off, but the fact that few actually hate it means something like it could actually get through.

To me the much larger problem is whether any of it will happen at all. On the one hand, Obama has had a history of coming strong out the gates but delivering a much watered down, and sometimes even retrogressive policy package (as with transparency). Looking for the status of the finance reforms just a month after their announcement, one finds almost no news. Tons of stories in mid-June, a few stragglers in late June, and then almost total silence in July. Even with the echo chamber effects, one would expect such an important issue to merit at least the occasional how's it going report.

PRI: Global Economy has a show with an 8:30 excerpt and summary of reactions.