noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646
DURHAM -- A year ago today he assumed the office, sweeping in on a wave of hope and high expectations.
A year after he took the oath to become the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama is no longer an unknown quantity. But still, a quarter of the way into his term, local experts and scholars remain divided over how much Obama has accomplished, how well he's done so far and his prospects for the future.
"I think he has done a pretty good job. But he's got a lot on his plate," said Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at UNC Chapel Hill who has written extensively on the presidency. "I can understand why those on the far left, and the far right, are not pleased, but I don't know that he ever promised to govern from the far left. He's trying to govern from the center, and that may be why he has disappointed some people."
Part of any disappointment with Obama, suggested Mike Munger, chairman of the political science department at Duke University, lies with a misunderstanding of the election that brought him to power.
"I think both sides misread the election as a mandate for his policies, while it was mostly personal," Munger said. "People were repudiating the Bush presidency and they were voting for Obama personally, not necessarily for his policies."
But the effectiveness of those policies has been debatable, particularly concerning the struggling economy.
"In all honesty, it's a bit of a mixed bag," said John Coleman, a professor of economics at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. "Obama's certainly been quite aggressive in promoting the government's role in trying to smooth out the business cycle fluctuations and the sources of instability in the economy. And in the short run, the stimulus package does seem to have provided some benefit to the economy."
The recession is technically over, Coleman added, which was one of the primary objectives of the stimulus package. "But unfortunately, the stimulus didn't create jobs, which was its main focus."
More importantly, Coleman added, the cost of the Obama administration's aggressive bailout of the financial markets "will be a ballooning deficit, and that needs to be paid off with higher taxes in the future."
Meanwhile, he said, "banks think they are now protected from the worst possible scenario and thus not receptive to making reforms they should make."
Robert Connolly, a professor of finance and economics at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School, goes much further. He believes that Obama's economic policy has been an unmitigated disaster.
"Just look at the rhetoric from the first month," Connelly said. "He said the stimulus will keep the unemployment rate down. That was flat-out wrong. The stimulus has been a massive waste of money and the unemployment rate is still way up."
The Obama administration, Connelly added, hadn't "delivered the goods."
"They haven't kept their eye on the ball," he said. "They may be smart guys, but they don't understand what it takes for a business to actually hire people. If I were unemployed, I'd be flaming mad with these guys. I don't understand what they hell they think they're up to."
Despite some harsh criticism Obama has received, Munger said the president generally remains personally popular, with his public opinion approval ratings well above the assessment of his policies.
"He may have frittered away some goodwill, but the Republicans are misjudging, too," said Munger, who ran as the Libertarian candidate for governor in 2008. "People are just as angry at them, and they are not offering any alternatives now."
Gerhardt suggested that Obama could have avoided some of the difficulties he's encountered if he had taken more of a leadership role during the past year.
"He probably should have used his bully pulpit more, particularly when it came to health care," Gerhardt said. "And he may have discovered that there can be a risk in compromising too much."
But he noted that, no matter what Obama had done, "presidential honeymoons" aren't like they used to be.
"In fact, they don't really exist any more," Gerhardt said. "This president really didn't have one."
