How quickly we forget- if we ever even noticed in the first place...

http://juneauempire.com/opinion/2012-03-23/pro-liberals-must-stand-president#.T2yRfdVKHE0

(President) Obama abolished the United States' use of torture and the CIA's secret prisons. He restored the liberal internationalist approach to foreign policy and made a historic outreach to the Muslim world. He stabilized an economy that was spiraling into a depression.

He expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and made major investments in job training, education, infrastructure, clean energy, housing and scientific research. He saved the automobile industry.
He forced the health insurance companies to stop excluding people with preexisting conditions and to stop dropping people when they got sick. He made an enormous and historic gain toward universal health care. He signed a financial reform bill that established a consumer protection agency and put most derivative trading on an open exchange under the regulatory umbrella.
He ended the war in Iraq exactly as he promised.
He ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He blocked Republicans from eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood. He suspended deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants lacking a criminal record. He has supported family unity in immigration policy. He stood up to the oil lobby on the Keystone XL pipeline. And he has represented the United States with consummate dignity.
Somehow, all of this is routinely discounted or forgotten. If Obama does not win a second term, a Republican administration will savage Medicare and Medicaid, enact yet another massive tax cut for the 1 percent, and try to privatize Social Security. Obama, for all his shortcomings, is still indispensable to the cause of ending the Reagan era, and of preventing something even worse than the administration he succeeded.

• Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University.