In his final column for Newsweek Howard Fineman takes a look at the Obama presidency to date and finds that it has fallen far short of expectations.

From Newsweek

The last time I was in the Roosevelt  Room at the White House, President Obama was in the midst of a very visible crisis and I was not impressed by the man he had found to handle it. Oil was vomiting from BP’s well in the Gulf of Mexico—cable TV was showing the ghastly flow live—but the federal official tasked with ending the siege, soon-to-be-retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, seemed way too ponderously bureaucratic for the job. In the Roosevelt Room, beneath a picture of the hard-charging TR, he sat stiffly at the conference table. In a laborious, jargon-cluttered  presentation, Allen tried to convince me and other wise-guy reporters that he had everything  under control. After all, he was the government’s “national incident commander”! Most of us in the room were predictably hysterical. The gulf was dead, as was the way of life it supported. We tauntingly quoted Malia Obama: “Plug the hole, Daddy!” she’d said—a disaster movie in the making.

Well, as we all now know, the BP hole is plugged, and while the damage to the gulf and the life around it was severe, it was not the apocalypse that world-class marine biologists such as James Carville thought it would be. BP is on the hook for $20 billion in damages, and America’s Solomon, Kenneth Feinberg, is doling out the dough. But the president gets minimal credit because his gulf achievement—and Allen’s—was comparative and abstract. They had avoided what would have been a worse catastrophe. It was a triumph, but  in the past imperfect tense.

The BP crisis and its political aftermath are apt symbols for what ails, and what ultimately might save, the president and the Democrats. They are going to get hammered in November. He and they overpromised and underperformed. But if they avoid a blowout it will in part be because voters see the Obama that is, not the fiction they worshiped or dreaded. He is the plodding “national incident commander” for our beleaguered era, and his accomplishments—to the extent he has them—so far are mostly about how our predicament would have been worse had it not been for his bailing of water. It’s a hard message to sell in the midst of 9.5 percent unemployment, when dollar discount stores are all the rage, and the gap between the rich and everyone else in the country is as wide as it has been since the Progressive Era.

Fineman stops well short of calling Obama a failure and trys to provide the president some cover calling the expectations about his presidency grandiose yet Fineman and his mainstream media buddies were the ones largely responsible for creating the grandiose expectations in the first place.

It will sting Obama to some degree to see yet another of his liberal media allies showing some disillusionment but Fineman hasn’t crossed over to the dark side of conservatism by any means as he leaves Newsweek to join the even further to the left Huffington Post where he will truly be free to be liberal that he is.

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