#first term

Revised Philosophy

TOOK THE LAST TEST OF THE TRIMESTER

Went out for a run

Took a shower

Practiced a Psychology presentation with my father

🕓 Total study time: half an hour

🎧 Listened: Dog days are over by Florence + the machine and Stephanie by Joker out

📺 Watched: football

📖 Read: a little bit of Book lovers by Emily Henry

👣 Walked/ran: 6,2km

That's an interesting question. Obama had a really tough first three years. He inherited two raging wars that were not going well at all and an even worse economic crisis than the pandemic's aftermath. Sometimes, I think people forgot how scary the Great Recession got between 2008 and 2010. All Presidents are forced to hit the ground running on Inauguration Day, but the Obama Administration had a five-alarm economic fire to put out from the moment he took the oath. It required expending a ton of political capital just to get things steady and heading in the right direction. And then the Democrats got slaughtered in the 2010 midterm elections.

So almost all of Obama's first term was spent climbing out of a deep hole and despite the fact that he had some major legislative accomplishments from pretty early on in his Presidency, he really didn't start finding his footing until 2011. I was highly critical of the Obama Administration's communications strategy during his first term because he had some massive legislative victories (the Recovery Act, repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, the 2010 tax reform bill, Dodd-Frank, S-CHIP, and, obviously, the Affordable Care Act), but they fumbled some of the rollouts and did a lousy job promoting the impact of those accomplishments and their successes in implementing TARP. That started to improve after the 2010 midterms and as Obama became more comfortable in the White House. Remember, when he was elected President in 2008, he had only had three years of experience in Washington as a junior Senator -- and, quite frankly, he spent a lot of that time building a Presidential campaign and running for the Presidency. No one is ever completely ready to be President on day one, but Obama needed a lot more on-the-job training about Washington politics than, say, George H.W. Bush or Biden. After President Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and started diving into the 2012 reelection campaign cycle, he was on a roll. He also seemed to do a better job arguing his points when he had the foil of an opposing party in control of a Congressional chamber after the 2010 midterms. But it was rough for most of that first term, even though it seems like he was chalking up legislative victories at first glance.

Biden had the advantage of eight years as an influential Vice President and nearly 40 years as a powerful U.S. Senator. There are few Presidents in all of American history who had more Washington experience than Joe Biden did on Inauguration Day. He also was succeeding the worst President in history; someone who had bungled the biggest health crisis in modern memory, been impeached twice and had just incited an insurrection that attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to overturn an election. It's not that he had an easier task -- not by any means -- but Biden would have really needed to fuck up right out of the gate in order to have done worse than his predecessor.

The Biden Administration has clearly had its struggles, as well, but I think his team was far better prepared to tackle those problems than Obama's was during Obama's first term. Of course, most of the Biden Administration had worked in Obama's Administration, so they knew what they were doing by that point, and they communicated far more effectively. I think the biggest individual legislative victories and policy accomplishments of Obama's first term were probably bigger than any of Biden's individual achievements, but Biden's may have been more immediately impactful to more people, if that makes any sense. I also think that the fact that President Biden’s party performed so well in his first midterm election will also be remembered as a big victory because that just doesn't usually happen historically, and future historians will see it as even more impressive in contrast with the political climate in which it occurred.

4.10.2021 |

I’m so excited about starting university that I can’t sleep! It’s a new beginning after 2 bad years.

“I didn’t start any new wars on my watch!”

Aw, go fuck yourself.

You started one war and failed to initiate another one.

You declared war on reality with your first words in office and you’ve carried it forward until today.

so today i finally got all of my assignment grades back and i thought i’d do one big post to write about how i found my first term at university. this term i had 4 modules, one compulsory and 3 i chose. to break it down i had 2 or 3 assignments for each and they varied from 10% to 60% of my final grade!

texts up close (compulsory module):

assignment one: no grade given

assignment two: 88/100 (this was a quiz)

assignment three: 62/100

journeys and quests:

assignment one: 65/100

assignment two: 62/100 (a group project)

assignment three: 58/100

shakespeare reframed:

assignment one: 58/100

assignment two: 65/100

assignment three: 65/100

romantic origins and the gothic afterlife:

assignment one: 62/100

assignment two: 62/100

as a whole, i’m really proud of what i was able to get in my first year, especially when essays seemed to be worded differently to a level, and that my marks were pretty close together