Action Reflects Growing Tensions Over Trade; Americans Say Chinese Have Been Engaged in "Dumping"
Barack Obama: Graying of a president
by Mark Silva
It could be the light.
There have been flecks of gray in the hair of the president since Inauguration Day, when the new chief executive's public-approval rating stood near 70 percent.
But it's the black hair that appears more scarce lately, as President Barack Obama nears the end of his first year in office with approval ratings hovering around 50 percent.
The year started with Obama promising "a new era of responsibility'' in an inaugural address that challenged Americans to "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.''
The year ends with Obama acknowledging "human and systemic'' failures in U.S. intelligence that led to a near-"catastrophic" breakdown in security with an attempted bomb-attack on a U.S.-bound airlinerexposing the fact that picking up and dusting off the weaknesses of the government revealed on Sept. 11, 2001, remains a work in progress.
Yet, the year also ends with both the House and Senate having acted on the president's call for health-care reform, albeit with sharply conflicting measures that must still be reconciled before the president can sign a bill into law.
This hasn't come easily. The president himself acknowledged in late September, when he undertook a five-network blitz of the Sunday morning news shows, that "there have been times where I have said, 'I've got to step up my game in terms of talking to the American people about issues like health care.'''
The year started with a massive economic stimulus for an economy in recession which the president won just one month into officea $787-billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act that has brought a modicum of payroll tax relief and pumped federal money into road and bridge work but not produced as many jobs as many believed might flow from all this spending.
The year ends with signs the recession has ended, Gross Domestic Product growing again. Yet the year ends with unemployment at 10 percent -- a "lagging indicator," as millions of Americans out of work can testify.
As the president's overall job-approval ratings have slid from a high of 69 percent in the Gallup Poll in the days following his inauguration to a low of 48 percent in recent weeksand as it hovers just above 50 percent in the most recent daily trackingObama has seen highs and lows on other fronts as well:
Obama came home from Copenhagen without the 2016 summer Olympic Games that his hometown Chicago had fought so hard to secure. But he also came home from Oslo with a Nobel Prize for Peace, something which he hadn't sought at all and indeed accepted with an avowed humility about others being more deserving of such an honor.
The president has begun to draw down troops from Iraq, fulfilling one campaign promise, while ramping up the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. And now, with the threat that terrorists based in Yemen have made to U.S. security in the Christmas Day assault on a Detroit-bound airliner, yet a third front of foreign wars is emerging.
Obama has won an energy bill in the House, but not in the Senate, and his hopes of pressing immigration reform have been pushed into his second year.
He offered, at the start, hope of healing the partisan rifts that have rendered Washington inert for so long. Yet the partisanship of Washington appears as poisonous these days as everwith the president's party scoring its big gains without much, if any help from Republicans: The stimulus bill was a largely Democratic initiative, clearing the Senate with just three Republicans on board, the energy bill cleared the House with the help of a handful of Republicans, the health-care bill cleared the House with just one Republican vote and the Senate passed its health-care measure over the objections of the GOP.
"What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility,'' Obama said at his inauguration on a cold day in January, "a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
"This is the price and the promise of citizenship,'' the newly inaugurated president said under sunny skies, with more than one million people packing the national mall from the White House to the Washington Monument to see a historic event, the swearing in of the first African American president in a nation once saddled with slavery.
"On this day,'' Obama said then, "we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.''
On this cold December day, with the president away for a holiday vacation in his birth state of Hawaii, those gray hairs are shining brighter in the portrait of a commander-in-chief fighting two wars abroad and a president fighting one with the GOP at home.
It's probably not just the light.
(Above: President Barack Obama is pictured at the top on vacation in Hawaii this week after acknowledging intelligence failures in the aftermath of an attempted airliner downing in a photo by by Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images. Obama and wife Michelle Obama are pictured dancing at the President's Home States Ball on the eve of his inauguration as president in a photo by Corey Lowenstein / Raleigh News & Observer / MCT. Obama is pictured greeting his gray-haired predecessor, former President George W. Bush, at the inaugural ceremony on Jan. 20 in a photo by Alex Wong / Getty Images. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are pictured at the inauguration in a photo by Brian Baer / Sacramento Bee / MCT. Obama is pictured delivering his inaugural address at the Capitol in a photo by Harry E. Walker / MCT and taking the oath of office in a photo by Chuck Kennedy / MCT)
Obama's Orders Declassification Of Documents
President Obama has issued an executive order allowing for the declassification of millions of documents going back to the Cold War and World War II. It was the most decisive move made yet by a president who campaigned on promises he would bring a new era of openness and transparency to the White House.
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