Blog Archive: April, 2009

I appeared on CNN this weekend to grade President Obama's first 100 days with anchor Don Lemon, White House correspondent Ed Henry and former Bush domestic adviser Ron Christie.

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It's absurd to judge Obama's success at cleaning up messes that were decades in the making, based on his first 100 days in office. It's equally absurd to expect the first 100 days in the administration of an African-American president to change 390 years of racial history in this country. But it's an opportunity to asses were we really are, where we're headed and how far we've yet to go.

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Wednesday marked the beginning of what could be a stockholders revolution as Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis was ousted as chairman of the board. more »

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Congress passed the budget resolution for 2010 yesterday. The biggest progressive policy victory has already been well reported: the ability for Congress to use budget rules to pass health care reform and direct student lending with a simple majority vote in the Senate. more »

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Budget passes as Blue Dogs make PAYGO concession. President backs carbon cap and public health plan option, while rebutting attacks that Social Security is going bankrupt.

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An optimistic view of race relations depicted by a New York Times/CBS News poll this week misses the point. john a powell, the director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, warns in this interview that progressives as well as conservatives are badly misreading the racial landscape that the country has entered in the age of President Obama. powell's new organization, Americans for American Values, will examine the nation's continuing racial disparities from a new angle.

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Montana Sen. Jon Tester (D) is opposing legislation that would let bankruptcy judges force banks to renegotiate the terms of predatory home loans so as to prevent homeowners from being thrown out on the street. Here is his rationale: more »

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While the Democratic caucus cheers Arlen Specter’s party switch, progressives will have to wait and see if his votes will change as well.

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Somewhere back in February, about three weeks into the Obama Administration, everybody on the left suddenly noticed that there was something different going on with the conservatives. The outrageous screeds and paranoid delusions sounded pretty much as they always had -- but there was a new fury behind them, a strident urgency that hadn't been there before, and a very audible shift of the gears in right-wing behavior and rhetoric.

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Rather than just grading the president, I suggest we might profitably assess our own 100 days. Obama has stormed the national and world stages in his first weeks. But how have we done—particularly the progressives who have such a large stake in the success of this president—in relation to Obama? He has demonstrated remarkable mastery of the powers of the presidency to lead the country. Have we mastered the power of the citizenry to empower the president?

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