【clover】ECONOMIST DEBATE by WCNK

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开始DEBAT~~

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目录帖

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Debates topic:
" This house believes that Barack Obama is failing."
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The moderator's opening remarks
Feb 2nd 2010 | Robert Guest
Few politicians, in my lifetime, have raised such hopes. When I covered his presidential campaign, I met legions of大量 supporters who told me that Barack Obama would remake America and solve a surprising number of their personal problems.
Measured against the expectations of his most ardent fans—the kind of people who bought pictures of him riding a unicorn—Mr Obama's presidency has been a failure. But in this debate we will use a more reasonable yardstick.
1.Have his actions revived the economy or hobbled it? Has he made America safer? 2.Will he ever succeed in pushing through his big domestic reforms, such as health-care and energy? And if so, 3.will they do more good than harm?
3个主要讨论点
David Boaz, a libertarian from the Cato Institute, argues that President Obama is failing because he tried to do too much. Mr Boaz berates him for not grasping how inefficiently government works, or how little tolerance Americans have for its expansion. He frets that Mr Obama is adding debt, taxes and regulations to the burdens already endured by business. And he observes that the more voters see of his agenda, they less they like it.
反对：Obama太贪了，想改变太多但实行起来困难，只会增加负债。
Elaine Kamarck of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard disagrees. She notes that unlike some of his predecessors, Mr Obama exhibits展现出 no scandalous personal failings. As a man, he is held in high respect（这不就是Issue题目吗？）. She concedes that the Democrats' "obsession" with health reform is not shared by the public, and reckons it has distracted Mr Obama from his "robust economic agenda". But she sees him learning and adapting. After listening to Mr Obama's state-of-the-union address, she predicts that he will focus on jobs, regain the public's trust and win re-election in 2012.
支持：Obama个人魅力好，相信他会交出令人满意的答卷，第一年只是过渡期，state-of-union演讲更坚定了她的信心.
Our two debaters have made a spirited opening. I hope that in later statements they will dig deeper into domestic policy (perhaps addressing some of my questions above), and touch on foreign policy, too. How much does it matter that foreigners like Mr Obama more than George Bush? How dangerous are the concessions he has made to trade protectionists in Congress? How deftly is he dealing with Pakistan, Iran and China?
Let the argument begin.

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BACKGROUND READING


好动词，短语
好的修饰
好的句子
好的论据


America's foreign policy
Is there an Obama doctrine?“Just war”, not just war. And affordable, pleaseDec 17th 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition
BY HIS own admission, Barack Obama received his Nobel peace prize when his accomplishments were still “slight”. But he has big plans—including signing a new nuclear-arms reduction treaty with Russia and, eventually, ridding the world of atomic weapons altogether. When he collected his prize in Oslo on December 10th, he also gave a thought-provoking acceptance speech提名演讲. To some //it hit the rhetorical heights of Cicero (Simon Schama, a historian, in the Financial Times). For others (David Brooks, in the New York Times), there were echoes of Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian with a gloomy view of human nature. The question now obsessing America’s commentariat is whether this speech outlines an “Obama doctrine” in foreign policy. If so, what is it?
困扰美国评论界的问题：Obama的演讲是不是描述了一种“Obama教条”，如果是，那又是什么？
Mr Obama has never claimed to be a pacifist. Yet his critics on the right seemed surprised, pleasantly, when he said in Oslo that “there will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert异口同声—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” Bill Kristol, the neoconservative自由派转向的新保守主义者 editor of the Weekly Standard, praised his “hardheaded讲求实际 and pro-American tone”. Sarah Palin appeared to like his observation that “evil does exist in the world”. (She also reminded Americans that they could read her own musings冥想 on man’s fallen state in her new book.) John Bolton, on the other hand, remained in a grump愠怒. George Bush’s former ambassador to the United Nations took exception to Mr Obama’s acknowledgment that the world would “not eradicate除根 violent conflict in our lifetimes”. End violence? Merely to entertain such a possibility, he huffed深呼气 on television, “reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature”.
A presidential “doctrine”, however, needs to say more than that America will sometimes have to fight, and sometimes alone. The question is: when? If Mr Bush had a doctrine it was his belief in pre-emptive war, enunciated in the National Security Strategy of 2002 and enacted in Iraq the next year. Does Mr Obama, who opposed that war, accept the idea of pre-emption收买权 in any circumstances? Here the Oslo speech was vague. He cited the concept of “just war” (war waged only as a last resort or in self-defence, with “proportional” force and sparing civilians where possible), but said that nuclear proliferation核扩散 and failed states made it necessary to think about just war “in new ways”. These he did not specify. After referring to North Korea and Iran, he said only that “those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.”
Obama从未否认使用武力，问题是什么时候？他引用和平战争（本用于自卫），但是在核武器扩散时应该有新的定义，并指出朝鲜和伊朗不能一边用核武器武装自己一边寻求和平和。

Sometimes Mr Obama is accused of soft-headed 愚蠢的idealism (eg, for extending a tentative hand to Iran and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, to whom he passed a letter last week), and sometimes of a hard-hearted realism that pays too little heed to听从 human rights. When Iran cracked down on pro-democracy民主派 protesters in June, he muted his criticism for fear of disrupting the nuclear talks. His administration has made less fuss than some about human rights in China. In Oslo he defended his decision to treat with repressive残暴的 regimes政治制度 by arguing that “sanctions without outreach” and “condemnation without discussion” could end in stalemate僵局. On December 14th Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, took up the refrain. “Our principles are our north star,” she said, “but our tools and tactics must be flexible.”
Obama时而被批评过于天真，有时又被批不顾人权，过于强硬。Hillary Clinton 解释说“我们的目的很明确，方法可以很迂回”

So is this a distinctive Obama doctrine? Mr Bush’s officials also talked to North Korea and Iran, and got along well enough with China and Russia. What makes Mr Obama most different so far, argues Peter Beinart of the New America Foundation, a think-tank智囊团, is his conviction that an economically stricken America needs to pare down its foreign commitments.
PB分析说Obama与布什等不同在于经济受挫的美国迫使他放弃了对外的承诺

When Mr Obama said at West Point at the beginning of December that he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he also said that he refused to set goals “that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests”. By definition, a superpower has to sally forth出发 into the world. Arguably, Mr Obama’s main new idea, much easier to say than to achieve, is that it should also live within its means.
Obama在送走西点军校3000军队去阿富汗时并不愿定下超高的目标，具体说来大国已经出手了。总的说，Obama的能力范围内的新政策，说起来比做起来容易。

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Barack Obama's first year
Reality bites 现实沉重Governing is harder than campaigning. But America’s 44th president has made an adequate start政府现在比竞选时还难，但是Obama已经有了一个足够的开端

主要讲赞扬医改
Jan 14th 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition
FOR some, the magic is undimmed. Carl Baloney is extravagantly happy that Barack Obama is his president. He is old enough to remember segregation: back in the 1960s, his local university turned him away because he was black, he says. He is also old enough to have high blood pressure, which pushes his monthly health-insurance premiums skywards.
一个例子说明医改政策好。
Mr Obama plans to bar insurers from turning away the sick. That will take some of the fear out of life for people like Mr Baloney, who is self-employed and pays his own bills. Others in his neighbourhood near New Orleans are much worse off, he says: “Health care is the emergency room. Next stop is the funeral home.” This will change, predicts Mr Baloney, and he is proud that it will change under a black president. “I never thought I’d see it,” he says, “and such a sharp president, too.”

Others feel differently. “I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican, neither a jackass nor an elephant. But I wouldn’t vote for a socialist. Hell, I’d vote for Adolf Hitler before I’d vote for Barack Obama. At least you know what he’d do to you,” says Ron King, a retired policeman in Stuart, Virginia. He adds that Mr Obama “lies all the time” and is “dangerous; he’s trying to change the entire country.” Mr King has perhaps not rigorously thought through his Hitler analogy, but his anger is real.

Mr Obama came to power proclaiming an end “to the petty不重要的 grievances委屈...that for far too long have strangled扼杀 our politics” and to “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long”. By electing him, he said, Americans chose “unity of purpose有意地 over conflict and discord”. Alas, this was balderdash胡说.
Abroad, Mr Obama is still loved. But at home his star is tarnished污点. His approval rating has fallen from almost 70% at the time of his inauguration a year ago to 50% now. The proportion of 部分Americans who disapprove of the job he is doing has quadrupled四倍, from 12% to 44%. More than half of voters think the country is on the wrong track, and they are roughly evenly divided as to which of the two parties would do a better job of correcting that. A poll of polls by RealClearPolitics, a political website, finds that a generic Republican candidate for Congress beats(VS) a generic Democrat by 44% to 41%.
国内人民支持率下降，不满增多。
Mr Obama’s reputation as a miracle-worker was easier to maintain on the stump政治演说 than in office. He said he would end the war in Iraq, bring health insurance to all Americans, erect a cap-and-trade (cap-and-trade rules指的就是“总量管制和交易”规则。所谓“总量管制和交易”，是指在限制温室气体排放总量的基础上，通过买卖行政许可的方式来进行排放。)system to curb限制 global warming and clean America’s soiled reputation by closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay. He has not yet done any of these things, though he has made progress in Iraq and is close to signing a health-care bill.
做出的关于环保和关闭监狱的承诺没怎么实现，医改政策刚刚开始。
None of this should be surprising. Governing is hard, especially during an economic crisis. The American political system is fraught 充满不愉快with checks and balances: a president cannot simply tell Congress what to do. Everything takes time and requires ugly compromises. Nonetheless, many of Mr Obama’s fans feel let down.
作者对此表示理解，但是民意不同意。
The same technology that Mr Obama used so effectively to promote his candidacy can also be used to highlight his broken promises. When Democrats opted to hold the final negotiations on the health-care bill in secret, critics immediately posted footage of Mr Obama vowing that such talks would be televised. Ditto和前面相同的 his promise never to hire lobbyists, and to post bills议案 online for five days before he signed them. Some voters have concluded that he cannot be trusted. Others are outraged at被激怒 what they see as his march走向 towards European-style socialism. Anti-tax “tea party” protests have swept横扫 the country. Re-energised Republicans crow that they can recapture the House of Representatives众议院 this year, and cut the Democrats’ Senate supermajority down to size.
民众因为他不能兑现诺言而被激怒，反对党对夺回政权有信心。

Mr Obama came to power at a time when American-style free-market capitalism was seemingly in disgrace失宠. Many of his supporters thought he had a mandate to push the country significantly to the left. But since he took office, public opinion has shifted sharply to the right.
原以为他会有大动作，上任后发现他突然转变的极为保守。
At the beginning of 2008 Americans trusted Democrats over Republicans to deal with the deficit by a whopping 30 percentage-point margin差数, according to Ipsos-McClatchy. Now they prefer Republicans by seven points. On taxes, Democrats led by 17 points, but now trail by two. On protecting America against terrorists, their nine-point advantage has mutated to a seven-point deficit. And in areas where Democrats still have the advantage, the gap has narrowed: from 39 points to four on health care, from 21 to five on Iraq and from 44 to 25 on the environment.
种种数据表明民总部在支持他。
Americans have not suddenly fallen in love with Republicans, who seem keener to obstruct Mr Obama than to offer a coherent alternative. Rather, they are fed up with饱受。。之苦 the recession and government in general. Since Mr Obama is the public face of power, he gets the blame.
大众不是突然就不喜欢共和党，他们和Obama故意过不去只是因为他们饱受经济衰退之苦，而Obama变成了众矢之的。
Four cheers for 44A YouGov Polimetrix poll for The Economist found that Americans disapprove of Mr Obama’s handling of the economy by 54% to 40%. They also frown on his handling of health care (by 53% to 40%), terrorism (48% to 42%), immigration (49% to 28%), Afghanistan (51% to 39%), Iraq (50% to 41%), Social Security (49% to 33%) and gay rights (39% to 33%). Of the ten topics mentioned in the poll, he scored a pass mark on only two: education, where he has taken tentative steps to promote autonomous “charter” schools and the environment. In short, Americans still like Mr Obama more than they like his policies, but they are increasingly souring on both.
美国人爱Obama胜过他的政策，但是民众的新鲜劲已经过去了，两方面的支持率都在下降。
Yet, by some measures, his first year has been quite successful. He has made no disastrous mistakes, and can brag of吹嘘 four substantial achievements. First, he has done wonders for America’s image abroad. Foreigners warm to his African and Muslim roots, his childhood in Indonesia, his Harvard cosmopolitanism. He seems less brash傲慢, more diplomatic and more respectful of Muslims than his predecessor. He calls for a world free of nuclear weapons. He takes a stand against torture. He talks in complete sentences. “[E]ngagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation,” he told the Nobel committee. “But...[n]o repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.”
实际上Obama的第一年还算平稳，没犯大错，还有点小功劳，人品又好。
How much does this matter? Simon Anholt, an analyst, heroically estimates the value of the “Obama effect” on America’s global brand at $2.1 trillion. Each year, Mr Anholt commissions a poll of 20,000-40,000 people to find out how much they admire various countries’ people, culture, exports, governance, human-rights record and so on. He finds that admiration in one area often translates (illogically) into admiration in others. When George Bush was president, foreigners expressed less positive views of American goods, services and even the landscape. Under Mr Obama, he finds, America is once again the most admired country in the world (having slipped to seventh place in 2008). Using the same tools that consultants use to value brands such as Coca-Cola or Sony, he guesses that the value of “Brand America” has risen from $9.7 trillion to $11.8 trillion. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Mr Anholt calls this “a pretty good first year”.
仍旧表扬。
Second, and more concretely, the American economy appears to have stabilised. The crisis that was raging when Mr Obama was elected has eased. Carrying on where the previous administration left off, Mr Obama has used gobs of taxpayers’ cash吐唾沫数钱 to prop up支持 tottering banks and insurers. He deserves at least some of the credit for the American financial system not collapsing. He intervened to rescue two of America’s largest carmakers, General Motors and Chrysler. He stimulated demand with vast injections of borrowed money. All this, his supporters say, helped to restore confidence, thereby preventing a painful downturn from turning catastrophic.
经济上稳定了大局，挽救了银行和保险，汽车巨头。支持者称他阻止了问题的进一步恶化。
Third, Mr Obama has shown he is serious about winning in Afghanistan. As Iraq grows calmer, Mr Obama is pulling out American troops, as he said he would. If all goes to plan, only a handful will remain by the end of 2011. Meanwhile he is escalating the war in Afghanistan, as he also promised. By putting tens of thousands more American boots on the ground, he hopes to make the country stable enough to start pulling out by next summer. 阿富汗战争
Fourth, Mr Obama is close to signing the biggest shake-up of America’s dysfunctional health-care system since the 1960s. The House and Senate have each passed a bill, and now the two mammoth documents are being haggled into one. Before long—perhaps before Mr Obama’s state-of-the-union message—health reform will probably become law. 医改政策
Many details have yet to be finalised, but the outline looks roughly like this. Every American will be obliged to have health insurance. Those who cannot afford it will receive subsidies. States will set up carefully regulated exchanges to make it easier for individuals to shop around for the right policy. Insurers will be barred from excluding those with pre-existing health problems.
医改的评价
Most of the tens of millions of Americans who currently lack health cover will soon have it, predicts Mr Obama. And ways will be found to curb costs. The House bill calls for scores of pilot schemes to find cheaper ways of keeping people healthy. The Senate version would set up a commission to explore ways of doing it. The greatest single threat to America’s fiscal solvency—galloping health-care inflation—will thus be tamed.
Mr Obama’s detractors scoff. So what, they ask, if foreigners applaud him? Being liked is no guarantee of being effective. His Nobel peace prize will hardly make North Korea surrender its nuclear weapons. His admirers insist that Mr Obama’s patient and tactful style will eventually pay dividends有所回报: for example, by persuading Russia to lean on Iran to stop pursuing its own nuclear arsenal. His critics retort that it has shown few dividends yet. They think the world’s thugocrats see weakness in Mr Obama, and intend to exploit it.
This is harsh. Mr Obama has been quicker on the trigger 行动机敏than George Bush when it comes to assassinating terrorist suspects in Pakistan with missiles fired from drones. He has ordered roughly one such strike a week since taking office, killing some 400-500 militants and an unknown number of civilians. He may have ruffled hawks’ feathers by pushing for terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad to be tried in civilian courts, but he has shocked doves吓坏了民主党人, too, by refusing to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay until he figures out what to do with those inside.
称赞他比Bush强。*鸽派和鹰派：民主党和共和党
Mr Obama’s decision to ramp up加强 the fight in Afghanistan could hurt him politically. Doves fret that it will be his Vietnam—that a costly, bloody, unwinnable war will derail his presidency. Hawks gripe that although he made the right decision to send more troops, he dithered for months before making it and then exuded irresolution犹豫不决 as he did so. He said that America “has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan” and will only do “what can be achieved at a reasonable cost”. The Taliban may take that to mean that all they need to prevail is a little patience.
阿富汗战争加兵大家不支持。
Brickbats and tea-partiesOn the economy, Mr Obama’s critics make several points. Much of his stimulus spending will be wasted, they say, because government spending is always inefficient. The money he has borrowed will have to be paid back. Last year’s budget deficit, at an estimated 11.2% of GDP, was the highest since the second world war. That is not sustainable. Mr Obama will presumably address the deficit in his budget next month, but he has not said publicly how he will do so.
Tea-party-goers assume he will raise taxes. They worry that he plans to shift America to a permanently higher level of public spending and intrusive regulation. Mr Obama has hired legions of government employees, whose pay and benefits have outpaced those in the private sector. Although he says he believes in free markets, he does not always act that way. When Washington bailed out Detroit, politically favoured labour unions fared better than bondholders. Lobbyists took note. Conservatives fret that, having spent his life in law, academia and government, Mr Obama knows little about wealth creation. “He doesn’t know anybody who’s ever had a real job,” grumbles Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist.
Mr Obama calls himself a free trader, but he slapped tariffs on Chinese tyres last year, provoking swift retaliation. No full-blown trade war broke out, but America’s reputation has suffered. Foreigners complained more about America to the World Trade Organisation last year than about any other country bar China, according to Global Trade Alert, a watchdog.
Mr Obama’s proposed health-care reform has attracted brickbats from both left and right. The left frets that the final bill will probably not include a government-run health insurer (the “public option”). Critics on the right fear that the final goal is socialised medicine, with rationed care and scant rewards for innovators.
Others worry that reform will cost too much. Both bills call for wasteful spending to be cut, but largely in unspecified ways at some time in the future. And pitfalls abound. For example, if the government compels everyone to get health insurance, insurers can fairly easily cope with the requirement that they turn no one away. But if the fine for not buying insurance is too low, young healthy people may simply opt to pay it. Many will wait until they are ill to start buying insurance. So the pool of insured Americans will grow sicker. Premiums will rise, prompting more healthy people to stop buying insurance. This is called a “death spiral”. If it happens, either the system will collapse, or the government will have to save it with public money. Most likely, Congress will be tinkering with health care for years to come.
Mr Obama’s second year could be even tougher. If and when health reform passes, the Senate will start haggling about讨价还价 climate change. America’s failure to enact a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide earned Mr Obama frowns at皱眉 the Copenhagen climate summit last month, but carbon pricing is hugely controversial in America, and has become more so since Mr Obama became president. The House narrowly passed a cap-and-trade bill only by making it much weaker than planned. Greens hope that, so long as the Senate passes a bill of some kind, it can be tightened later. But there is no guarantee that it will pass.
Some pundits chide Mr Obama for letting Congress call the shots. He left it largely up to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the top Democrats in the House and Senate, to design a health-care plan and decide how stimulus money should be spent. The results, critics reckon, were more wasteful and less coherent than if Mr Obama had taken charge. Nobody wanted a health plan written wholly by White House wonks; but there was a middle ground available, where the president could simply have asserted his will more forcefully over the process.
Mr Obama is trying a more hands-on approach to regulating Wall Street, proposing a stronger role for the Federal Reserve in preventing financial firms from taking risks that imperil the system. House Democrats agree, but those in the Senate would rather set up a new regulator. Other looming battles include immigration reform (see article) and a bill to allow unions to organise without secret-ballot elections. Even if rogue states and terrorists are quiet, which is hardly likely, Mr Obama will have a turbulent 2010.
展望一下第二年，有更艰难的路要走。
A Spock or a Clinton?Pundits never tire of dissecting the president’s personality. Is he growing less popular because he is too aloof? Maureen Dowd, a liberal columnist, likens him to Mr Spock, the emotionless alien from Star Trek. Or is it his vanity? Conservatives mock his frequent use of the word “I”, as in: “I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world.”
民众分析总统性格纯属娱乐~~。
Such perceptions matter far less, however, than the state of the economy. The main reason Mr Obama’s polls have slipped is that Americans have spent the past year in fear of losing their jobs. When the economy recovers, Mr Obama will get the credit. If no recovery happens, the Republicans may regain the House. But even that need not be a disaster. After 1994, when Bill Clinton had to work with a Republican Congress, he governed from the centre, balancing the budget and signing welfare reform. And in 1996 he won a second term in the White House.
Obama行不行，一切得看经济复苏状况。

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Barack Obama's speeches
Homeward boundHow Barack Obama's concerns have changed over the past yearJan 28th 2010 | From The Economist online
IN HIS state-of-the-union speech on Wednesday January 27th Barack Obama shifted emphasis from his inaugural address, a comparable oratorical set-piece众多周知的 delivered a year ago. The internationalism of a year ago has given way to让步 a focus on domestic matters with the relative frequency of references to “America”, “Americans” and the nation going up, while those to the world declined. Whereas his inaugural address made no mention of banks or the financial sector, these appeared often in this week's speech. A sharper emphasis on the economic concerns of ordinary Americans shows up in Mr Obama’s more frequent references to jobs, workers and the economy.
重心转向国内事务，Obama更多提及工作，工人和经济。

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The Obama presidency, one year on
Time to get toughBarack Obama’s first year has been good, but not great—and things are going to get a lot harderJan 14th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
HOW far away it seems, that bitingly cold, crystal-clear morning when almost 2m people filled the Mall from Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument to hear the new president talk of the victory of hope over fear, of unity of purpose over conflict and discord. Recalling the dark days of the war of independence, he pledged, like George Washington, that in the face of common danger Americans under his leadership would come forth出现 to meet it. One year on, how well has he done?
背景+问题开头，精彩精辟。
Not too badly, by our reckoning (see article). In his first 12 months in office Mr Obama has overseen the stabilising of the economy, is on the point of bringing affordable health care to virtually实际上 every American citizen, has ended the era of torture, is robustly prosecuting the war in Afghanistan while gradually disengaging from Iraq; and perhaps more precious than any of these, he has cleared away much of the cloud of hatred and fear through which。。。通过它。。。 so much of the world saw the United States during George Bush’s presidency.
还算不错，走出了小布什的阴影。
More generally, Mr Obama has run a competent, disciplined yet heterodox administration, with few of the snafus大混乱 that characterised Bill Clinton’s first year. Just as important have been the roads not taken. Mr Obama has resisted the temptation to give in to the populists in his own party and saddle Wall Street with regulations that would choke it. He has eschewed punitive taxation on the entrepreneurs who animate the economy; and he has even, with the notable exception of a boneheaded tariff on cheap Chinese tyres, turned a deaf ear to the siren-song of the protectionists. In short, what’s not to like?
(除了轮胎特保案)哪样不让人欣喜？
Only one thing, really; but it is a big one, and it is the reason why most of the achievements listed above must be qualified. Mr Obama has too often remained above the fray, too anxious to be liked, and too ready to do the popular thing now and leave the awkward stuff till later. Far from living up to the bracing rhetoric of his inaugural, he has not been tough enough. In this second year of his presidency, to quote his formerly favourite preacher, his chickens will come home to roost.
有一个问题，他只是太受人喜欢了，他应该更加强硬。
It could have been so much betterAt home Mr Obama’s dangerous diffidence explains why the health bill that now seems likely to pass, while on balance a good thing rather than a bad one, is still a big disappointment. Yes, it makes provision for准备好 tens of millions of Americans who lack insurance, and many more who fear being cast into that boat should they lose their jobs. But it is expensive, and it takes only hesitant steps in the crucial direction of cost control. Constantly rising health-care charges threaten the entire federal government with bankruptcy. So it is tragic that the most comprehensive health reform in generations does so little to tackle this problem. Yet that, alas, is exactly what you would expect to happen if a president leaves the details to be written by Democrats in Congress, barely reaches out to the admittedly obstructive Republicans on issues such as tort reform, and remains magisterially有权威的 aloof from much of the process.医保实行很严峻。
Mr Obama’s failure to take on the spend-alls in his own party will cost him politically. His ratings are falling, and in November’s mid-term elections he looks likely, at the very least, to lose his supermajority in the Senate. Some critics argue that instead of focusing on health, he should have concentrated on jobs (the unemployment rate is two points higher than the 8% peak he predicted). That seems unfair: health care was the core part of his campaign and something America had to tackle. What has spooked吓 the voters is the sheer cost of the scheme—and the idea that Mr Obama is unable to tackle the deficit.
这一计划的总支出和没能停止的赤字令人担忧。   
They are right to be worried. The national debt is set to reach a market-rattling $12 trillion by 2015, more than double what it was when Mr Obama took over. It made sense for the government to pump money into the economy in 2009; but this year Mr Obama must show how he intends to deal with the debt. So far, he has not offered even an outline of how he intends to do so. Because he failed to be harsh with congressional Democrats (whose popularity ratings, incidentally, were a fraction of his), he will now have to do more with Republicans.
Not by carrots aloneThis same reluctance勉强 to get tough, or even mildly sweaty, is felt in America’s dealings with other nations. His long-drawn-out decision on Afghanistan mirrored that on health care. Yes, by sending more troops, he did more-or-less the right thing eventually. But it seemed as if the number of troops was determined by opinion polls, rather than the mission in hand. And the protracted dithering was damaging to morale.
Mr Obama has been on a goodwill tour of the world, proffering the open hand rather than the fist. Yet he has nothing much to show for it, other than a series of slaps in the face. Israel dismissed his settlement freeze. Going to China with human rights far down the agenda and the Dalai Lama royally snubbed seems to have done Mr Obama no good at all, judging by the fiasco that was the climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Co-operation between the “G2” was supposed to help fulfil Mr Obama’s grandiose promise that his presidency would be “the moment when…our planet began to heal”. Hitting the reset button on relations with Russia has produced nothing more than a click. Offering engagement with the Iranians was worth a go, but has produced nothing yet. This generosity to America’s enemies also sits ill with a more brusque approach to staunch allies, such as Japan (see article), Britain and several east European countries.
种种事实和推断表现出他的“软”，应该更强硬！
Some worry that Mr Obama will always be a community organiser, never a commander-in-chief. In fact he did not get to the White House by merely being nice, but by being bold and often confronting awkward subjects head-on. It is not too late for him to toughen up. Firm talk about the budget in his state-of-the-union message would help. Now that the administration’s priority has shifted from engaging Iran to imposing sanctions, Mr Obama may be able to apply the stick and not the carrot. He is due to see the Dalai Lama. He might even, if he can relearn the virtues of bipartisan dealmaking, bully a climate-change bill through Congress. But this will all be a lot more difficult than anything he did in his first year.
有人担心他永远就是个社区工作者，而非领导人 。他都有胆见达赖，就应该敢敲国会竹杠通过气候议案，不过这比起第一年要困难得多。~~

wcnkUID: 2546550

The proposer's opening remarks
Feb 2nd 2010 | David Boaz
The editors make it too easy when they remind us that in claiming the Democratic nomination in June 2008 Barack Obama declared that "generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless … when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal … when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth." It truly would take a Messiah to fulfil such soaring promises.

有点ARGU的味道，以作者观点开头，直接反对。

But part of President Obama's problem may be that he tried to fulfil too many of them, with no sense of the limits of the state's efficacy or the public's tolerance for expanded government. The claims of some of his advocates in 2008 that no one could spend 12 years at the University of Chicago without absorbing some sense of the benefits of markets, the limits of government and the hard lessons of the 20th century now seem as off-base as Ben Stein's buy recommendation on Merrill Lynch in late 2007.

Obama贪多嚼不烂。TS+例证

On 20 January 2009, the day of Obama's inauguration, the Washington Post wrote, "The federal government itself is a far more potent instrument, in its breadth and depth of command over national life, than it has ever been before." President Obama has never quite thanked President Bush for the new powers he inherited, but he has certainly used them.

没太弄懂，大概说Obama应该感谢Bush政府留给他的史无前例的强硬政府体系。

Bush raised the federal budget by more than $1.5 trillion. He bequeathed to Obama a FY2009 deficit of about $1.3 trillion, which Obama proceeded to increase with his "stimulus" bill, an earmark-heavy omnibus appropriations bill, Cash for Clunkers and more. But more than spending, he seemed bent on决心 using a crisis atmosphere ("You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Rahm Emanuel) to amass more money and power in Washington. He proposed to bring the key health-care and energy industries under the direction of the federal government. He sought to tell financial companies how they could invest and what they could pay. I don't think he really wanted to nationalise the automobile companies; it's just that, as Uncle Duke said of the pension fund, the automobile industry was just sitting there. So he snatched it up夺取, and he and Congress started imposing political rules: build "clean cars" rather than cars that consumers want to buy, don't build them in China, don't buy palladium from the cheapest overseas sources, use unionised trucking companies, keep inefficient dealerships open—and make enough profits to pay the taxpayers back.

作者说Obama想借金融危机扩大联邦政府的权力，使本不想国有化的汽车公司国有化，攫取他人的劳动果实，然后又强调环保，制造那些人们不想买的高价车，默认贸易保护。。

His Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would use previously unknown powers to regulate greenhouse gases. His Labor Department plans to push through 90 rules and regulations in 2010 that would strengthen unions and add costs to employers. He sought to寻找 give more regulatory powers制定规章制度的权利 to the Federal Reserve, as a reward for causing the bubble and financial collapse. He has proposed various schemes to encourage more lending to homebuyers with insufficient credit, which were just those that combined with easy money to create the housing collapse in the first place. His top advisers "flipped through the tax code, looking for ideas" on taxes to raise, reported the Wall Street Journal.

他的环境保护计划声称。。。试图寻找机会增加联邦机构的职能，鼓励低信用者透支--这正是金融危机的元凶。

In many ways, of course, Obama has just doubled down on瞧不起 George W. Bush's policies of bailouts, takeovers, expanded Fed powers and nationalisations. Some of the opposition to him reflects the public's sense that we've been piling up堆起 spending and debt for over a year now, so he is being punished for his predecessor's mistakes. But Bush or Obama, these policies take us in the wrong direction. After a crisis brought on by cheap money and distortionary subsidies补贴, he is doing more of the same. In a recession he is adding debt, taxes and regulation to the burdens already felt by business.
一年来经济没有起色，Obama有不可推卸的责任，他带领我们走错了方向，加重了本来就很重的负担。
The policies themselves are bad enough. The lobbying frenzy created by all this money on the table is not healthy for our politics. And the uncertainty created by this ambitious and protean agenda retards recovery. From last January ("growing anxiety on Wall Street about what the government would do next", New York Times) to this month ("The people that have money are sitting in kind性质上 of a cocoon—they're not making decisions because they're concerned about what's coming down in terms of taxation and vindictiveness against the wealthy," Denver Post), we see employers and investors worrying about what Washington might do next.
And now the voters are turning against this sweeping泛泛的 agenda that seeks to make America a European welfare state. Obama came into office on a wave of good feeling, with 69% expressing approval and only 12% expressing disapproval. Now his ratings are below 50%. Obama's approval rating fell 21 points during his first year in office, the largest first-year decline for any president since Gallup began tracking presidential approval ratings in the 1930s. Approval by independent voters has fallen from 62% to 45%. And even young people are leaving: The Politico/Insider Advantage poll showed Scott Brown leading among voters under 30 by 61% against 30%. In contrast, the 2008 exit poll showed 18-29-year-olds in Massachusetts voting for Obama 78-20.
Worse, the voters aren't just grumbling. They have switched parties in New Jersey, Virginia and even deep-blue Massachusetts. Congressional Democrats are scurrying急忙走出 for the exits, and even Vice-President Biden's son has decided to take a pass on the 2010 Senate race.

种种数据论证Obama的政策导致民众支持率下降。

Worse yet for Obama, voters are not just reacting to the continuing economic weakness or engaging in fickle channel-changing. They are increasingly opposed to his plans to "remake this great nation". The longer Congress debates the health-care bill, the less voters like it. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll 53% said they disapprove of the federal government's expanded role in the efforts to fix the nation's economy, 60% disapprove of the government's financial help to banks and other lending institutions and 65% disapprove of the government's ownership stake in General Motors.

Obama本人提出的“改造这个伟大国家”的计划使他自己遭到人民怀疑。

It is not just specific policies. The director of Pew Research says that "anti-government sentiment, which had been building for years, was heightened by the financial bailout and stimulus program". In a January Washington Post-ABC News poll, Americans said they prefer "smaller government and fewer services" to "larger government with more services" by 58% to 38%. Since Obama won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin of support for smaller government has increased in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points. Gallup data show that 57% of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals, the highest number since October 1994.
民众不支持政府的改造方案。
When your policies aren't working, the voters have noticed and your transformative ideological agenda is moving broad public opinion in the other direction, it's safe to say you're failing.
总结一下，误导了大众还不如承认失败了.