Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there (American humorist Will Rogers)
You’d think being only the third American President to win the Nobel Peace Prize – and this in his first year in office – would have propelled Barack Obama to the highest popularity levels ever, but – like someone who wins an Oscar for Best Actor and appears in a couple of duds the same year – he finished ignominiously, tied for the lowest approval ratings ever with former US president Ronald Reagan. How did it happen?
It’s in the report card for his Freshman year. Let’s hope he graduates in three more.

WAR: F
He proved that fighting for peace is like fornicating for virginity, won’t keep his promise to bring the troops home from Iraq – where they’re no threat to the US – or Afghanistan, where he applauded President Hamid Karzai’s fraudulent re-election because he’s “our guy.”

HEALTH CARE RESULTS: A
Bill Clinton failed miserably, but Obama has somehow succeeded in bringing universal health care, as basic a right as food or shelter, to the US, despite the gonzo opposition of people who think creeping Socialism is as bad as bounding Communism – until they need a doctor and can’t pay for it. This despite failing to keep his promise to have a transparent debate, which probably goes to show that people shouldn’t know how laws, or sausages, are made.

ECONOMY: D
Yes, he inherited a mess, but Obama said he wasn’t elected President to help fat cat bankers on Wall Street – some of his biggest supporters – but he’s done just that, allowing them to keep the trillions of dollars they got from George Bush’s administration without controls on how they use it. They’ve enriched themselves by using taxpayer money to speculate in risky investments, the same tactics which created the Great Near Depression of 2008-09, instead of loaning it to small and medium sized businesses, or for safe mortgages. Bankers, like Wall Street fund managers, prefer absolute greed with someone else’s money and their actions and Obama’s inaction created a false recovery with short-term dividends in the stock market at the same time jobless lines keep growing, at 10% unemployment and stuck there, with another 85,000 Americans losing their jobs last month while the bankers pay themselves bonuses. Obama apparently missed the class in economics which said a recession is when someone else is out of a job, and a depression is when you’re out of a job. If he really wants to trigger a Real Deal to help the US, and the world, he could ban adjustable rate mortgages, which keep bursting the bubble of recovery as they kick in and people are kicked out of their homes, and instead clamp controls on banks and jail some violators there and on Wall Street, and turn his attention to Main Street, if he can find it without a long black limousine.

GAY RIGHTS: F
He said he would support gay marriages but ran away from that issue faster than Tiger Woods hot-footed it away from his wife who was swinging a 3-iron in his direction for being a serial adulterer.

TERRORISM: F 
 He’s just as bad in his passivity as Bush was in his aggression to deal with terrorists who’d love to bring the US to its knees while killing as many people as possible. Bush, who was asleep at the wheel for eight years, waking up every so often to order somebody’s toenails pulled out, had his shoe bomber, and Obama has his underwear bomber, his own al-Qaeda operative who tried to bring down an airliner with plastic explosives. Obama accepted the blame for the failure of US intelligence agencies who’ve been hamstrung by his orders to go easier on suspects and interrogation, although someone should have informed him that terrorists groups don’t follow the Geneva Convention. The murder of 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas by a US Army soldier who had terrorist leanings wouldn’t have happened either if the spooks the US employs to stop them were allowed to do their jobs.

FOREIGN POLICY/DIPLOMACY: B+
While Bush was an addle-brained cowboy who shot first and asked questions later, Obama has used his tongue and kept his gun in his holster while giving American would-be enemies the chance to engage in dialogue, and a chance to let negotiations lead to peace. But he hasn’t realized what Rogers said about diplomacy: “It is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.” His administration has backtracked or reneged on promises in the Middle East where he let Israel expand settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories because he prefers the Jewish-American vote to peace there, and the EU is a spectator. Obama is willing to talk the talk, but not walk the walk and can’t even get both sides to even talk. But he’s wisely staying out of hatred cauldrons like Yemen, where a US invasion to stop terrorist incubators would create new legions of terrorist martyrs.

IRAN: C
Iran is building a nuclear bomb. Repeat: Iran is building a nuclear bomb and the US and EU and Israel know it, but Obama has settled for a middle-of-the-road approach, the kind that never works because there’s only talk –the EU’s favored approach – and never a solution, until there’s a big mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv or somewhere, and then the inevitable retaliation. Obama is sane and reasoned, while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not, and you can’t talk to a man with a nuclear bomb in his hand, especially if he’s crazy enough to use it. This one is a hot potato because Israel wants to go after Iran, the US vacillating, and the EU – as it always is –wants someone else to do the thinking, talking and fighting and stay out of it.

TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS: B
He’s a lot more acceptable to the EU than was Bush, and at least he’s listening instead of doing all the talking, although he still treats Britain like an American colony.

GUANTANAMO: F
He promised to close the US terrorist suspect detention center in Cuba within a year of taking office but missed the deadline, disappointing his rabid EU supporters who thought Mr. Change would make a change there, even if they disappeared when asked how many former detainees they were willing to accept in Europe, which was few indeed because they don’t want some of the many who’ve returned to terrorism to ride subways in London or Madrid or anywhere else in Europe.