Three years, 41 months, 165 weeks or 1155 days; it doesn’t matter how you look at it, President Barack Obama has been in office for almost a full term.
Has he done enough with the time he has had?
We are still in a full blown recession and our unemployment rate is at a disappointing 8.3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a report released on March 9. Meanwhile we bailed out companies that outsource the majority of their labor to other countries.
Yet Osama bin Laden has been killed under his administration, our troops are starting to leave war-zones, and he has attempted and set ground work in process for a large number of his campaign promises.
Has he done a lot? No.
There are two ways of looking at his lack of actions.
The first, he has been inactive, his family took 16 vacations during his presidency according to the Washington Examiner.
However, George W. Bush had retreated to his ranch a total of 30 times by this time in his own presidency, and had spent over twice as long on vacation that Obama has.
Obama hasn’t fulfilled a majority of his campaign promises, his policies have made little to no head way, both in the foreign and domestic realms.
Then the second way of looking at this: He hasn’t done anything terrible.
He has not gotten us into wars that we can’t afford, causing our massive deficit, making it so over half of our federal budget goes to defence, he inherited those from his Republican predecessor, Bush.
He has attempted to reform health care, he attempted to bring home our troops, he has attempted to do a lot of things, he hasn’t done very much.
Does he deserve more time? Has he done enough to at least get a second lap?
We gave Bush another four years, while his approval rating was only 1 percent higher than Obama’s current 49 percent, according to Gallup.
If in another four years he passes his vision of health care reform, it will be one of the most positive and major reforms to our country in the last hundred years. At this point America is one of the last industrial westernized countries not using a socialized medical system.
The medical systems in Western Europe have been shown to be over twice as efficient as American ones, with the system costing significantly less and having a higher quality of care.
If he removes American troops from the Middle Eastern conflicts and reduces the defence budget to a manageable amount, he might just turn our economy around.
According to the Department of the Treasury, the national deficit increased by more than $1.6 trillion. At that time, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were costing us an estimated $12.2 billion a month, according to an article published in USA Today in 2010.
Obama has already cut some of the spending in these areas, and promises to increase those cuts and withdrawals from war-zones in his second term.
His first term has been slightly more than disappointing, and his actions have been few and far between.
But, presidents tend to be slow in their first term as to not burn bridges before reelection. It is in their second term most presidents tend to do their major work.
Obama needs a second term to prove what he can do.
