"If I were President"

This weekend the New York Times launched a series titled If I were President. I read it yesterday and found it completely vacuous. Some folks didn't take it very seriously and those who did seemed to actually be answering the question "What if I were made king/queen of the universe."

Today I find that I'm in good company since Ezra Klein, Steve Benen and Jonathan Chait all agree with me.

But Klein uses the moment to throw out a response to his own version of an interesting question: "What could Obama have done?"

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways in which the past few years could have gone differently. I’ve even come up with a few. But none of them lead to dramatically better outcomes today.

...I’ve never been able to come up with a realistic scenario in which a lot more got done, the economy is in much better shape, and the president is dramatically more popular today...

Indeed, if you had taken me aside in 2008 and sketched out the first three years of Obama’s presidency, I would have thought you were being overoptimistic: an $800 billion stimulus package — recall that people were only talking in the $200-$300 billion range back then — followed by near-universal health-care reform, followed by financial regulation, followed by another stimulus (in the 2010 tax deal), followed by the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” followed by the killing of Osama bin Laden and the apparent ousting of Moammar Gaddafi? There was no way. And yet all that did get done.

I'd also second what Benen added:

Agreed. On the accomplishment front, if you’d told me in December 2008 that Barack Obama, after 32 months in office, would accomplish all of the things Ezra mentioned — along with New START, auto-industry rescue, student loans, food safety, etc. — I would have been skeptical. It generally takes presidents two terms to put together that many accomplishments. Indeed, most presidents leave office with far fewer landmark achievements. The notion that Obama would do all of this in 32 months would have seemed fanciful, and yet, here we are.

Yes...here we are indeed. Up until the last few days when we've had good news coming out of Libya, its been a tough couple of months. But these guys know the score and this list of accomplishments is more than any of us could have imagined or predicted.

In the end, I'll just say that I'm glad I'm not President. And I'm awfully grateful that Barack Obama is.