奥巴马,历史将如何评价我2013.01.23-Barack Obama-how will history see me.doc

Barack Obama How will history see me? If Barack Obama wants to be remembered as a great president, he should focus on three long-term problems NEXT week Barack Obama will take the oath of office as elected president of the United States for the second time—an honour granted only to 16 men before him. When he returns to the Oval Office he will rediscover a string of problems, from domestic struggles over America’s debt ceiling and gun control to bloodier conflicts in Mali and Syria. But now more than ever he would be wise to look at the long term. Mr Obama will not run for office again. How will history see him? More favourably, we hope, than it would if he were judged just on the past four years. That is not to dismiss the accomplishments of his first term. Few presidents have had to take office against such a dismal backdrop, with the economy contracting at 5% a year, jobs being shed at the rate of 800,000 a month and America mired in two failing wars. Mr Obama has done a creditable job of putting a critically ill patient on the road to recovery. His main legislative achievement—health-care reform—may yet help millions of Americans, though the verdict on that must await its full implementation. All this, together with an unconvincing opponent, persuaded enough Americans (and The Economist) to back him in November. But his first term was nowhere near successful enough to earn Mr Obama the mantle of greatness—or to guard him against the possibility of a disastrous second term wiping away all else. The Obama legacy will partly be defined by events. When George W. Bush sat reading to schoolchildren in Florida on September 11th 2001, “the war on terror” was not part of his vocabulary. Mr Obama may well be blindsided by something similarly out of the blue. But Mr Bush is also often described as the man who expanded government more than any president since Lyndon Johnson; that was a legacy he could have avoided. More to his credit, Mr Bush will also be remembered for dram