I give him a D/D+ grade. If were grading him on a curve though I would give him a B-, maybe a B on a good day just because he's been put into a situation so difficult almost nobody could have done well.
There are some things I don't like about what he has done.
He focused on the wrong people with the economy, handled the bailouts very badly, gave too many breaks to financial corporations that didn't deserve it and catered to them first, focused to much on financial institutions and structures instead of real life normal people that are getting desperate, had a trickle down economic plan when he should of had a trickle up one, the stimulus was too little, didn't go to the right people, didn't crate that many jobs and didn't create any lasting jobs. He's afraid to raise any taxes on the rich even when he needs to do it to get any reasonable relief for everybody else because unfortunately even democrats are starting to side with them now in their economic thinking. In all he has too many play-baby half-ass answers on the economy when drastically significant action is needed even if that borders on socialism with some things.
Lets also not fool ourselves we are not out of the woods yet. The worst is not over, and even when it does get over it will takes years and years and year and years to get back to something that is acceptable, if ever. This isn't like past recessions. Not only are so many people laid off, but with so many people with reduced hours and reduced wages and salaries and reduced benefits it will take a long time for just those people to get back to normal before fully laid off people even start to come back. I wouldn't be surprised if 7%-9% unemployment becomes the new normal for a long time to come, even after we start recovering or maybe even after we have "recovered". If in that time we have another recession, even a normal one we are very VERY screwed. I think there is a possibility the US will never be the same. I know it will be whole generations before Michigan recovers if it ever does, and the way it's going it very well might never happen. Even if it does there is a good chance I will be an old man by the time it happens.
Relying on getting the populace, especially the significant and growing masses of the poor in high tech or jobs that require a lot of education WILL NOT WORK. Too many people didn't have the resources to make that happen, the government and the people in the country didn't want to invest the resources when they were needed and never had the political will to even make it remotely possible with our society from the begging, and we were not set up as a society to even begin making that happen for a lot of other reasons. We have also made things more efficient to the point of eliminating people for the profit of few not making things more efficient for the betterment of everybody. It seems that all the capitalist out there thought we would just get all those nice new jobs by now, and we would all become educated, that even a lot of the high end jobs wouldn't leave in outsourcing even though nothing was stopping them, and we would have the resources to do all that and live happily ever after while all our virtual slaves of globalization made cheap crap for us to by cheaply. That was just so far removed from reality even if most people with common sense could see the foolishness of it and tell you that in about ten seconds of listening to that way of thinking. There was just too many problems that made that totally unrealistic, and guess what? It turned out to be a disaster, even if it was one anybody with common sense could see coming a mile away, like two trains about to collide but unable to stop even as the passengers can see it happening well before hand. Our reward for that is we sacrificed our own people so we can buy cheap things from Wal-Mart made by people we have exploited even more than the people here.
As far as health care goes, I agree with the people that think he should have never let other people take the initiative away from him on it. I also think he compromised way too much on it, watered it down too much, sold out to get some of the last votes he thought he was going to need from people playing the game before losing the supermajority (although lets be honest, his "supermajority" was always the very loosest and most tenuous of ones and he never really had one except in name) and again has done play-baby measures with trying to fix it and doesn't make it go far enough. Half-assed solutions don't fix problems.
Also there will not be a bits and pieces strategy with health care that will work. So many things are interconnected with it will just screw up something else if only one thing is fixed unless everything about it is fixed and overhauled.
We need good fixes and we need them yesterday. Everybody is talking and not doing anything to actually fix the problems, like that always happens with them, even Obama.
