With all the "100 Day" talk of late, I thought it would be both refreshing and constructive to consider the Black Agenda Report Card on Obama's First 100 Days. This is from Bruce A. Dixon, who is also an occasional commentator on Open Left.
The Report Card evaluates 18 categories, items, with points assigned as follows:
1. Health Care Reform (9 points)
2. Creating New Jobs and Preserving Old Ones (5 points)
3. Fully Funding and Preserving Public Education (6 points)
4. War & Peace (9 points)
5. Transportation (5 points)
6. Caribbean and Latin America (4 points)
7. Obama's Africa Policy; Our Brotherman and the Motherland (5 points)
8. Wall Street Bailout (6 points)
9. Debt and Foreclosure Crises (6 points)
10. Investigating Bush-era Crimes (5 points)
11. Criminalizing Immigration, Militarizing the Border (5 points)
12. Broadband For Everyone and a Just and Fair Media (5 points)
13. Environment (5 points)
14. Agricultural Policy, and Policy Toward Black Farmers (5 points)
15. Mass imprisonment (5 points)
16. Employee Free Choice Act (5 points)
17. Urban Policy (5 points)
18. Privatization of Government Agencies and Services (5 points)
Brief excerpts of each item, with scores assigned and some comments by me on the flip. This is, of course, no substitute for reading the full original. Hopefully it will whet some appetites.
Being a weekend guy, I can either be early, late or altogether absent. So I'm going with early. As the 100-day mark approaches, I see four major political themes. These are:
(2) The GOP's collapse into political incoherence.
(3) The Democrats' inability--even unwillingness--to capitalize on the GOP's collapse into political incoherence.
(4) The gathering of storm-clouds beyond the immediate reality of (1)-(3) that could spell big trouble for the Democrats, and actually allow the GOP to get back in the game as early as 2010 or 2012, but definitely by 2016. OTOH, if the Democrats did pay attention to these gathering clouds and do something about them, then another 30-40 years of electoral dominance could easily become possible.
Items (1)-(3) are fairly obvious and straightforward, and have taken most of folks attention over the past few months, so I'll deal primarily with (4) on the flip. But I invite folks to discuss them all in the comments.
