Seeing the picture below make the rounds on the internet, I was struck by the fact that Obama has been the president George Bush should have been: steady, stable, conservative, tepid, showing all the stability of someone immersed in the system, effective on foreign policy and not screwing up anything notably. There are people saying that this is a stupendous achievement, and perhaps “he screwed up nothing in particular” is all that we can hope for nowadays, and it is such an improvement over the previous president, but still, it’s an odd twist of history. 
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This Greenwald-ery is ridiculous. There are many other things (Healthcare? DADT? Ending torture?) that were accomplished during a period of extreme hostility and economic malaise. One could make the case that Obama has accomplished more (in three years) than any president since FDR.
I don’t think that case would hold up very well. Look at someone like Lyndon Johnson – the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, and the “Great Society” programs are far, far more ambitious (and significant in American life) than anything Obama has even attempted. The Health Care laws are not even implemented and establish the extraordinary principle that a person, by being born in this country, MUST by law establish a relationship with a large insurance company. This, given no price controls, is likely to be an extraordinary gift to these companies. This is an accomplishment, but one that would have been fully within the compass of the Bush brand (which, among other things, gave us the “biggest entitlement since Social Security” with the Prescription Drug Act, also a big gift to corporations). And are any of these things extraordinary accomplishments? Hardly. Any comparison with FDR is risible.