Moving forward is also progress. And that's the way a New York Times' political analyst sees two Obama achievements that could have been setbacks.
He brokered a nonbinding agreement with other world powers to fight global warming, averting the collapse of an international summit meeting. And he blessed a compromise on health care to guarantee the votes needed to pass the Senate.
Neither deal represented a final victory, and in fact some on the left in his own party argued that both of them amounted to sellouts on principle in favor of expediency. But both agreements served the purpose of keeping the process moving forward, inching ever closer toward Mr. Obama’s goals and providing a jolt of adrenaline for a White House eager to validate its first year in office.
A Republican critic defines the success/failure in terms of whether these achievements "improve his poll ratings with swing voters" or "energize his base." Whether they're money in the Democratic political bank, in other words, not whether they add to the public good.
Nor are political scorekeepers in the White House slow to savor a political victory.
Little this year has come as easily as Mr. Obama and his team once imagined, but as they sort through the balance sheet, they argue that the mediocre poll ratings do not reflect the record.
Mr. Emanuel noted that a year ago, the economy was on the brink of a depression and the financial and auto industries were near collapse. Today, the economy is growing again, and banks and one of the large car companies are repaying government bailouts, although unemployment remains perilously high and the national debt is soaring.
He also ticked off a series of legislative measures that passed with little notice — an expansion of health care for lower-income children, new regulations on the tobacco and credit card industries and an overhaul of military acquisition. With health care now looking closer to passage, Mr. Emanuel called it the “most significant legislative first year of a first-term president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
Even so, White House officials are frustrated at the difficulties they have had. As they talk about their agenda for 2010, some Democrats have suggested looking for a few easy, popular initiatives as sort of a breather between the big-ticket, often polarizing proposals that dominated 2009.
