OBAMA 2.O
depth survey by The Huffington
Post of the problems and prospects facing the president from
the moment he placed his hand on
two Bibles: the one Abraham Lincoln used in 1861, and the “traveling” one Martin Luther King, Jr.,
kept at his side.
A series of stories on The Huffington Post, entitled “The Road
Forward,” offers the results of that
survey: 20 reported pieces, expert
blog posts, HuffPost Live video
interviews with reporters, and
poll data from HuffPost/YouGov.
Ahead, we’ve spotlighted four of
these pieces, focusing on the middle class, environment, financial
reform and drones.
The most crucial part of any
HuffPost project comes after we
publish it, in the form of comments from our vast and voluble
social community. We pioneered a
mix of news reporting, social media and community input, and no
story we publish is supposed to be
the final word. Just the opposite —
we encourage you to add your take.
Say this about Obama: he likes
to be seen as aiming high. His
2012 campaign slogan was one
mighty word with a period at the
end of it: “FORWARD.” So, taking
the president at his word — liter-
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
ally — we are calling the series
“THE ROAD FORWARD: Obama’s
Second Term Challenges.”
Eighteen Huffington Post reporters in Washington and New
York, plus six in Canada and Europe, examine how far we have
come — and how far Obama still
needs to go to move “FORWARD”
into the Promised Land.
Drudges on the right see the
president as a malignant and unstoppable force out to utterly
transform America. But our reporters found something less
apocalyptic. Obama actually has
been less daring than he could
have been, less systematic than he
should have been, and more focused on short-term politics than
his lofty, man-of-big-ideas image
would suggest.
We start with the middle class,
in whose name the president has,
fitfully, dedicated his presidency.
There is no question that the
president helped save the global
system of trade and credit from
collapse — a collapse that would
have ruined us all, middle class
included. Also, as his aides regularly point out, the promise of
more widely available health care,
subsidized by taxpayers, can make
up for some of the downdraft in
job and wages.
But reporters Dave Jamieson
and Arthur Delaney found that