For President Barack Obama, nearly every move since the moment he became the first black American to be elected President of the United States, has been tracked and incessantly labeled as ‘First Breath’, ‘First Day’, ‘First Week’, ‘First time hitting head while entering Marine One’.  While to some extent, these ‘firsts’ are tracked at the beginning of every President’s first term, and with the public attention given to Barack Obama, it is hardly unexpected that President Obama has received so much attention.  But with his first month only four days away, how is Obama doing as President?

For a Conservative, his time in office thus far has been a major disappointment.  In his first two weeks, Obama did take a few good steps in attempting to work with Republicans; but when he began to realize Republicans weren’t just going to lay down and accept every disagreeable Democrat demand, he decided to drop his facade and stopped trying to appease Republicans.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, aka the Spending package cooked up by Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, is almost entirely a Democratic grab bag.  The Dems only included requests from three Republicans in the Senate (all House Republicans voted against), putting them just over the required super majority, and making them filibuster proof.  Convenient, eh?

Saturday Night Live may like to make fun of Republicans betting on regaining the majority through public outrage over this spending package, but Obama is making a very poor strategic choice here.  By starting his Presidency off on the wrong foot, he is virtually guaranteeing his time in office will be much tougher than Bush’s was.  For a man who will in all likelihood remain the best campaigner America has seen at least in the last century, he has shown extremely poor foresight for his prospects of reelection in four years and (more importantly) the chapter that will surely be written about him as the first black American as President.

2010 and 2012 should be far off however; for those of us involved in the 2008 election, it quickly became obvious that the electorate became extremely fatigued of the elongated election cycle.  For now, Republicans should stick to their principles on government and with any luck, the excessive [governmental] expansionist policies will be abandoned or at least slowed. 

I still wish the best for our President, but perhaps more so I wish that he would correct his course after taking us on a rocky first month.  After all, we all have to pay for it (literally).