Obama on 100: 'Not a miracle worker'
Posted: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 12:10 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
The First 100 Days, Barack Obama
From NBC’s Domenico Montanaro
President Obama said he is “pleased,” but not “satisfied” with what he and his administration have accomplished in his first 100 days while speaking at a town hall in Arnold, Mo.
“I'm not a miracle worker,” Obama declared, after saying he’s not "content" when workers are out of jobs, some don’t have health care and the U.S. is not leading the world in developing 21st Century solutions to energy.
He tried to buy himself some space, urging patience on solutions and reminding that he inherited these crises, which he said “were many years in the making” and that it’s going to take a while to overcome them.
“We've come a long way,” the president said. “We can see the light on the horizon, but we have a long journey ahead.”
Obama used that same rhetorical “suspension-of-disbelief” flair seen on the campaign trail when saying that people shouldn’t be surprised by the policies he’s pursued. After all, he’d laid them all out during the campaign, he said.
“It's not like anybody should be surprised,” he said, adding almost laughing, “The things we've done are the plans we've talked about for two years.”
He boasted that “it's good to be out of Washington. It's good to be in the Midwest, … where common sense often reigns.”
This is Obama’s latest trip to a battleground state. Remember, Missouri was the closest state of the 2008 presidential election. He lost it by fewer than 4,000 votes.
(When speaking, Obama twice pronounced Missouri, by the way, as Missour-uh. Arnold, however, is outside St. Louis and not in the Southwest section of the state where Missour-uh is the accepted pronunciation.)
More to come from NBC's Athena Jones, who's on the ground at the town hall in Arnold, Mo.
