WMU students and professors give their own 100-day report card to Obama

By Ranchithaa Anatory
Western Herald

(Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT) U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a press conference June 23, 2009 in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

When President Barack Obama entered the oval office in late January, the entire world knew how large of a task he had ahead of him. Having made many campaign promises to deal with an economic crisis, deteriorating diplomatic relationships and the need to figure out what actions to take in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama would be held to a high standard in his first 100 days.

The trend of measuring a president’s performance after 100 days in office was set when Franklin Delanor Roosevelt’s first version of the New Deal took shape just after 103 days in office.
Now, with a $787 billion stimulus plan, a bank bailout package, housing recovery measures, brought in more than 100 days in office later, one cannot help but to sit back and analyze how Obama has performed.

“With Obama, 100 days don’t say much because so much has been dawned upon him, and the problems are huge,” said David Houghton, Ph.D., an associate professor in the political science department at Western Michigan University.

Houghton said that although there is a lot of issues concerning healthcare, where the economy is concerned, employment has been rising gradually, but a lot of its progress can be assured only in summer, depending on the state’s and city’s expenditure to further increase employment.

“A lot of the economy depends on whether people can get jobs, get loans and buy houses,” Houghton said, “and Obama can only do so much about that. He can’t force banks to give out money.”

“[Obama] is successful in the sense of public relations: his popularity level remains high, as is relatively common with new presidents,” said Peter Wielhouwer, associate professor of political science at WMU and executive director of the Southwestern Social Science Association.

“I consider this a success because it means he is having the influence he intends, not that I necessarily believe these changes are positive for the U.S. in general,” he said.

There are some on campus who are not as lenient. According to Damon Fleming, a second year economics graduate student, Obama’s idea to raise taxes will only promote unemployment, making the whole move ineffective.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Fleming said.

Wielhouwer has his own critiques of Obama. “He has been less successful in foreign affairs, where his response to the North Korea and Iran crises have been timid and he has largely deferred to other nations’ leadership in those areas. He has made several rookie mistakes in his first five months: ordering the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison, without a plan for what to do with the prisoners; inviting Iranian diplomats to 4th of July parties at U.S. embassies; his lack of response to anti-American diatribes in his presence by Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega.”

However, others think that Obama’s moves to mend diplomatic ties have generally been positive.

“The Bush administration always had a stick, always punishing those it didn’t agree with,” Greg Mikesell, a senior majoring in secondary education physics, said. “Obama’s trying to fix that.”

According to Houghton, as impressed as the affected nations might be with Obama’s approach, the bottom line has to be when negotiations take place and what comes out of it.

“I don’t see how troops could be leaving sooner than five to ten years,” Houghton said. He also said that a drastic and sudden retrieval of U.S. troops from Iraq could cause a civil war, making matters worse. Houghton added that although Obama is withdrawing soldiers gradually according to a time-table, he believes that Bush would have had a similar time-table.

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Jun 29 2009. Filed under Campus, Nation, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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