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After the 2014 midterm elections, much of the Beltway media decided President Obama was an irrelevant lame-duck who would accomplish nothing in his final two years. Obama would hold the office, but he could forget about advancing his agenda. The president’s days of adding to his legacy, the pundits agreed, were over.
And we now know those observers were spectacularly wrong.
Since Election Day 2014, Obama has racked up wins on climate, Iran’s nuclear program, Cuba, trade-promotion authority, a breakthrough immigration policy, overtime pay, net neutrality, and even the freeing of some American prisoners in North Korea. If we add the Supreme Court to the mix, the president also scored key legal victories on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act.
For some presidents, that’s the sort of list that might represent an entire term. For Obama, that’s just the last year – a year in which Congress did very little in the way of meaningful work, and a year in which the president was supposed to sit in the Oval Office, twiddling his thumbs, waiting for time to elapse.
To his credit, and our benefit, Obama has flipped the lame-duck narrative on its head.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...d=sm_fb_maddow
And we now know those observers were spectacularly wrong.
Since Election Day 2014, Obama has racked up wins on climate, Iran’s nuclear program, Cuba, trade-promotion authority, a breakthrough immigration policy, overtime pay, net neutrality, and even the freeing of some American prisoners in North Korea. If we add the Supreme Court to the mix, the president also scored key legal victories on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act.
For some presidents, that’s the sort of list that might represent an entire term. For Obama, that’s just the last year – a year in which Congress did very little in the way of meaningful work, and a year in which the president was supposed to sit in the Oval Office, twiddling his thumbs, waiting for time to elapse.
To his credit, and our benefit, Obama has flipped the lame-duck narrative on its head.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...d=sm_fb_maddow
