To:  All and Sundry

Date:  2009 November

Re:  Barack Obama One Year On

When he first was elected, he inherited, as he points out now, a seriously bad economy, two wars, and mostly bad international relations.

However, since during 2009 his plans at health reform had foundered, Americans don’t see any scaling down of the war in Iraq and they do see indecisiveness over conduct of the war in Afghanistan, and since they’re not convinced by administration’s claims that the recession has ended, and since in their unhappiness they reduced Obama’s approval ratings from about 70% to about 50% and also elected Republican governors to Virginia and even New Jersey, now suddenly Obama ratchets up claims to say he inherited a ‘financial crisis that threatened to plunge our economy into a Great Depression, the worst that we’ve seen in generations’, a claim he never made until now.  He said his administration saved the economy from ‘imminent collapse’, another new claim.

All this talk might attempt to shift blame, but also savors of Third World political rhetoric–shades of Bangalore’s chaos and Beijing’s control!