Quote of the Day: Refuting the GOP Claim that Obama's First Term Has Been a "Failure"

I - like most of us I suspect - love immediate gratification.  It's an aspect of human nature I suspect.  But sometimes our desires for immediate gratification simply cannot be met given all of the attendant circumstances.  A case in point is the nation's economy.  Having launched my law firm with the intent to focus heavily on real estate as it turns out right before the real estate market collapsed I know first had the financial cost the economic collapse shepherded in by Bush?Cheney and the GOP controlled Congress.  As a result, I had high hopes for Obama and recall sitting with a group of gays and straights in the Bourbon Street Pub in Key West on Inauguration  Day 2009.  Many people were in tears that day.  Have all of our hopes been realized?  Certainly not, but compared to where the nation was we have come a long way.  Yes, we might have gone even further toward full recovery, but we had a major obstacle: the GOP controlled House of Representatives which obstructed virtually everything Obama sought to do from Inauguration Day onward. But did Obama fail us?  Andrew Sullivan sums up the reality of what Obama has accomplished - in spite of the Republicans.  Here are the principal highlights:

I have no idea what standard people are using to declare Obama's first term a failure. To save us from a Great Depression, rescue the auto industry, re-regulate Wall Street, decimate al Qaeda, kill bin Laden and Qaddafi and provide universal healthcare? That's failure? 

Unemployment is lower now than it was when he took office, and moving downward. Next year's IMF-predicted US growth is higher than any other developed country. Compared with austerity-ridden Europe, where unemployment is still climbing, Obama's, Geithner's and Bernanke's leadership has been stellar. The US has never exported as much as now as a percentage of GDP ever. Given the catastrophe Obama walked into, and the froth-flecked obstructionism of his opposition, he's had a remarkably successful, historic first term. His long game also makes much of the progress promised durable only if he gets a second term.

He told us it would take two terms; he predicted obstruction and setbacks; yet he has persisted - and succeeded. But take his second term away? Back to ballooning, rather than shrinking deficits, millions left without access to private health insurance, a guaranteed war against Iran, climate change policy handed over to the oil and coal companies, and massive spending on defense we don't need. Not to mention torture.

And a highlight from Chait's case against Romney:

[T]he reality remains that a vote for Romney is a vote for his party — a party that, by almost universal acclimation, utterly failed when last entrusted with governing. Romney may be brainier, more competent, and more mentally nimble than George W. Bush. But his party has, unbelievably, grown far more extreme in the years since Bush departed.  .  .  .  .  The party has almost no capacity to respond to the conditions and problems that actually exist in the world.

And Andrew doesn't even factor the contrast so far between Obama's response to Hurricane Sandy compared to the failed GOP response after Hurricane Katrina.  Oh, and did I mention that Romney has surrounded him with countless former Bus/Cheney advisers?