Goals worth fighting for

david s. broder
WashPost
Thursday, November 4, 2010

The message to President Obama from Tuesday's election could not have been plainer: Don't abandon your goals. Change your way of operating.

There will be a temptation to interpret the Democrats' loss of their House majority and of at least six Senate seats as a rejection of Obama's first-term agenda, the one on which he was elected in 2008.

American voters are not that flighty or unsettled. What happened was that Obama ran into several crises that he and others had not anticipated, and the cumulative weight of those problems ended up frustrating him.

The biggest problem by far was the economy, the virtual collapse of the financial system starting in the autumn of 2008 while George W. Bush was still president. That eased Obama's path to the presidency but it saddled him with a huge and lingering burden once he was in office.

He was also burdened by the legacy of two wars and a backlog of unmet domestic needs, ranging from a dysfunctional health-care system to undernourished infrastructure and energy sectors.

(More here.)