The only grade that matters for a politician is what comes out of the ballot box. But that doesn’t keep the political class from constantly grading the performance of most pols. Today, The Associated Press’s Jennifer Loven and Liz Sidoti offer a pretty damning report card, with a few important qualifications, for President Obama. The benchmark they use to judge Obama is his 2007 campaign announcement speech in Springfield, Ill. To wit:
[P]rogress is scant on all the largest fronts he laid out three years ago:
_Washington is just as divided now as then, if not more so. Most every piece of legislation Obama has signed has been passed by Congress largely along partisan lines, and political gamesmanship is in full swing. Obama is a polarizing figure himself; a recent Gallup Poll found a 65 percentage-point gap between Democrats and Republicans on their approval of Obama, the largest for any president in his first year in office.
_America is still at war in Iraq. U.S. combat troops are supposed to be out by this August by the latest presidential deadline — later than candidate Obama had planned.
_The economy is on the mend and Obama has made investments in education. But his efforts to curb climate change and overhaul the nation’s immigration system are stalled.
_His health care overhaul, after nearly reaching conclusion and then grinding to a halt with Republicans’ upset win of a Senate seat from Massachusetts, now hangs by a thread after a year of work.
_Obama banned torture but the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorism suspects — a U.S. eyesore to American allies_ remains open despite a pledge to close it. And while Obama stepped up efforts to root out terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, America was nearly hit again by a terrorist on Christmas.
It’s almost as if, standing in Illinois, Obama foretold the future, saying: “Too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in, and people turn away, disappointed as before, left to struggle on their own.”
Read the whole article here.