Obama turned 49 yesterday and is 18 months into his presidency.

Over at DailyKos, David Sirota echoes a common complaint that Obama is meaner to the left than to the right. Jonathan Chait responds at his blog.

The massive enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans has numerous causes, but surely one of them is the exquisite sensitivity to insult displayed by progressive activists.

Sirota complains about the war in Afghanistan and the public option. The fact is that one of Obama's campaign promises was to focus on Afghanistan and pull out of Iraq. Also it seems to me he accomodated Pelosi by giving a July 2011 draw-down date. Regarding the public option, Senator Lieberman blocked it, end of story.

It's fine to try to move the Overton window but one should strive to be accurate about what the Obama administration has accomplished.

They came into office in the midst of the the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. They did some unpopular things to stabilize the situation in the face of rock solid Republican obstructionism. They enacted the stimulus (ARRA) which for all its faults was necessary. They appointed some good people to the Federal Reserve Bank and the National Labor Relations Board. They nominated two liberalish Supreme Court judges and passed liberalish health care reform - which was controversial and spawned the Teabaggers. They passed financial regulation reform in the face of rock solid Republican obstructionism. Regarding health care reform they went the reconciliation route which is pretty confrontational.

They confronted Arizona over its outlandish immigration policies. I'm sure there are things I'm forgetting, but one thing people should be reminded of is that Obama hasn't massively screwed up. That takes skill. And luck.

Most of all he has kept progressive politics in the game.* The analogy I like to make is that in juggling and in hacky-sack the object of the game is to keep the ball in the air. You lose if it hits the ground. Obama has kept the ball in the air in the face of some tough economic challenges.

Robert Reich writes about the "enthusiasm gap."

Hopefully Obama will nominate Elizabeth Warren.**
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* One of my favorite moments was when during his live on-air State of the Union speech, Obama called out the Roberts Supreme Court over their recently-made Citizens United ruling. And they were seated right in front of him. So there's a good example of being confrontational with conservatives even if they're members of a very powerful co-equal branch of government. And money in politics - the subject of the ruling - is the ultimate source of many of the problems Obama has been dealing with, whether it's the private sector failure in the financial markets or the private sector failure in our health care system, the latter of which we will have to deal with in order to fix the Federal government's long term budget problems.
** Ugh, Christina Romer is rumored to be resigning.