As my title suggests for the most part I agree. Obama can't just waive a magic wand and wipe away all of our problems.

I think people are pissed off because they saw this government create nearly $900,000,000,000 out of thin air and give it to the very financial institutions that helped to cause this mess.

I think people are pissed off because they want to get back to work, and only recently the President has taken steps toward job creation programs (which in my opinion should have been the first thing he did before health care).

National health care is important and needs to be restructured...but with 10% of the population out of work...people wonder if this should have been the priority.

Their is obviously alot more to this, and I could go on, but I think the overall point of the email is correct, but I guess I just understand why people are attacking the president and why they are so angry.

While I don't agree with his approach, I don't think Obama has really broken any promises, since his whole election campaign consisted of staying as vague as possible and making himself a blank screen upon which people could project their own personal hopes and dreams. Most voters are idiots so it's a brilliant strategy for getting elected, I don't fault him for it.

The healthcare thing really is a fad and a huge distraction from more important matters. Most of the uninsured were illegal aliens, homeless people, etc. and most people probably would have been better off if the administration had created jobs instead of focusing on that, not to mention the porkulus bill was a big bust and created very few if any jobs. Then we have the bailouts to rich bankers...yeah I'm upset with him, but broken promises? Nah.

The defense above is true, but only if we limit ourselves to the strawman argument that the problems the Obama administration inherited have no silver bullet. Granted much of what passes for analysis from the right wing is premised on exactly that exercise in futility of finding a short-term fix.

What the author of the e-mail conveniently ignores is whether the policies put in place in the past year have the promise to help over the longer term. On Afghanistan, the administration hasn't repudiated the Bush administration's failed strategy; it's adopted and even escalated them. If this truly is the graveyard of empires, what expectation should we have that the outcome of troop escalation, aerial bombing, and expansion of the war into Pakistan will improve the conditions in Afghanistan or the safety of the American people?

On the economy, Obama has put his trust in the same folks who brought us the disaster. He's shoveled even more money to the "to big to fail" banks and has yet to put forward any fundamental change in the markets or in protection of the American consumer and American jobs. Even McCain has taken a more progressive position in this area (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100111/scheer2)!

Maybe I got it wrong. During the presidential campaign I wrote columns blasting Sen. John McCain for siding with the big bankers on deregulation, citing his choosing ex-Senator Phil Gramm, currently a vice chairman of the Swiss-owned banking giant UBS, as his presidential campaign chair. Barack Obama, on the other hand, repeatedly blasted Gramm and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which the Texas Republican had pushed through Congress, with President Bill Clinton's support--legislation that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and radically deregulated the financial industry.

But now the roles are reversed, and it is McCain who, along with Senator Maria Cantwell, D-WA, has sponsored a bill to repeal Gramm's legislation, while Obama seeks to preserve it.

The Gramm legislation, which permitted the merger of investment and commercial banks into too-big-to-fail corporations (including Citigroup and AIG, two financial giants that had to be bailed out by taxpayers), was thought by Obama the candidate to be a key cause of the meltdown. But as president he reappointed the Clinton-era officials who had sided with Gramm in ending sensible banking regulations that had protected the public for seventy years and made the US banking system the envy of the world.

Rather than restore Glass-Steagall, the Obama-backed banking regulation bill passed last month by the Democratic majority in the House went along with the desire of Wall Street lobbyists to prevent the breakup of the big conglomerates and to block control of their massive trading in the derivatives that proved to be so toxic.

The question is not, can one realistically expect these problems to be fixed in one year. The question is, has Obama actually made "the hard choices" and "painful and contentious first steps" that we were promised?

Blockquote seemed not to work there (bug?).

The section from "Maybe I got it wrong" through "the derivatives that proved to be so toxic" is a quote from the Sheer article. The last paragraph is my own.

The success or failure of this Administration will likely be measured by the following questions (which would not ultimately be posed until sometime in the Fall of 2012):

"Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was?"

These are the questions that then-Gov. Ronald Reagan posed to voters in his Oct. 28, 1980 debate with President Jimmy Carter.

A few days later voters answered the question fairly decisively; Reagan beat Carter by about ten points, winning a massive electoral vote victory.

If voters were asked these questions today, President Obama probably would not like their answer . . . but 2012 is a long way off and President Obama certainly has the intelligence and political skills necessary to shape a result that would be favorable to him.