Country ... USA Politics 2012 ... Analysing Obama's track record

Inside Story ... Cornel West and Paul Street weigh up Obama's achievements and shortcomings as we ask if he should get a second term. Surprisingly superficial and unrealistic!

COMMENTARY

My view is that this program was surprisingly superficial and unrealistic ... but I should not have been surprised.

For quite a long time, my impression of Professor Cornel West is that he represents views that are somewhat out of date and not very useful. The problem is that he has a high profile and his views get listened to by a lot of people. He is also bright enough to make all his positions seem right because of the facts that he mobilizes to support his point of view.

I did not know of Paul Street before this program. Again, many of the facts he cites are valid, but in the end the conclusions do not help to get big problems solved.

While I accept that many of the facts discussed are true, the opinions derived from these facts are, in my view quite simplistic and wrong. Politics has always been the 'art of the possible' and it is pretty clear that there is a huge power structure in Washingtron and around the United States that the President, especially a Democratic President cannot move. When people who one would expect to be 'with' the president, like Cornel West and Paul Street are so negative, it is no wonder that the political 'right' gets so much traction.

Peter Burgess

Analysing Obama's track record ... Cornel West and Paul Street weigh up Obama's achievements and shortcomings as we ask if he should get a second term.

Barack Obama, the US president, is running on his record as he fights for another term in the White House. It was a successful campaign based on hope and change that won him the 2008 election, persuading enough voters to believe in his 'Yes We Can' pledge to alter the course of both foreign and domestic policy.

'The psychological dimension is that [Obama] had a relative lack of courage, a relative lack of backbone ... and the political dimension is that he had surrounded himself with Wall St. people to convince the establishment that he was worthy of acceptance and approval and therefore he listened very closely to what they had to say.' - Cornel West, an author, academic and activist

By the time he took office one of the worst financial crises was taking hold in the US and across the globe. Now more than three years have passed and the president is asking the country for another term.

His supporters argue that Obama's achievements surpass those of other first term presidents who were not even wrestling with global financial meltdown.

But his critics argue that far from delivering the social change he promised, he brought continuity with the previous administration - and worse still, he did so under the guise of progressive politics and in so doing shifted the entire political discourse even further to the right.

So with opinions about his legacy thus far divided, we ask: Has Obama fulfilled his campaign promises?

Inside Story US2012, with presenter Shihab Rattansi, takes a critical analysis of his achievements with guests: Cornel West, a professor emeritus of Princeton University, activist and author of The Rich & the Rest of Us - A Poverty Manifesto, and Paul Street, a journalist and author of Barack Obama and the future of American Politics.

'It's very odd how for some progressives and liberals in this country wars, secret detentions and bailouts and violations of habeas corpus, that were heinous and terrible and hideous when an inarticulate white Republican from West Texas does it, becomes curiously okay when a sophisticated black lawyer does it.' - Paul Street, a journalist and author