Rachel Maddow on Obama's First Year

Turns out that a lot of the things that have happened in the lest than two years of this administration are the biggest or first or most important in generations. On the occasion of the Wall Street Reform announcement today, Tagan Godard at CQ politics wrote "Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform this country."

Even before today's historic Wall Street Reform agreement, President Obama of course did what politicians have been trying to do for more than 60 years, he passed Health Reform, which for the first time establishes government responsibility for the health care of American citizens.

Consider also the Stimulus Bill. It didn't just throw a lasso around our entire economy and yank it back from the brink, it also pumped about $100 billion dollars into the crumbling embarrassment of our national infrastructure and transportation system. It was the largest investment in infrastructure since IKE.

For solving our country's energy problems, something Obama has compared to man walking on the Moon, it contained about $60 billion dollars in spending and tax incentives for renewable and clean energy, also an historic investment.

It also included an unheralded, but giant investment in science and tech and upped the budgets at NASA, the National Science Foundation, and an experimental energy research agency that was created under President George W. Bush, but never funded until now.

President Obama also expanded state kids' health insurance to cover another four million kids. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act for equal pay for equal work.

He signed a nuclear arms deal with Russia that would reduce both countries' arsenals by a third. He created a new global non-proliferation initiative to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. He set forth an international way forward on that radical left-wing proposition of Ronald Reagan, a world without nuclear weapons.

Then there are the legislative and policy achievements that don't just build on previously set precedents, but set new ones. The Hate Crimes Prevention act, also known as the Matthew Shepard Act. It had languished in Congress for years. The Food and Drug Administration, permitted for the first time to regulate tobacco.

Better late than never, he dismantled the scandal-plagued Minerals Management Service, broke it into three parts so that the folks who collect money from oil leases aren't the same ones regulating the industry. Now it will actually investigate the industry that it was busy schtooping and doing drugs with during the last administration.

Obama fired two wartime commanding generals in little over a year, overhauled the astonishing stupidity of the student loan system, in which banks were being subsidized to give loans that were guaranteed by the government anyway, a license to print money that was ended and the savings put toward actual aid to students.

He canceled a weapons program that was bloated, unnecessary and total irrelevant to either of our current wars, the F-22. Why even mention the cancellation of a single weapons system? Because that never happens! Weapon systems never get cancelled! The F-22 did, which is itself a miracle.

Each of these achievements and the list of things he has yet to do: Don't Ask Don't Tell, Closing Guantanamo... in each of these things, there is room for liberal disappointment. I sang a bitter-sweet lullaby to the lost Public Option when I go to sleep at night.

But presidential legacies are complex, not event the Reagan Administration's legacy is as pure as the Conservative-driven snow. But taken Goddard at CQ Politics was right today about nothing this big happening since FDR, the list of legislative accomplishments of this president in half a term, even before Energy Reform, which he's probably gonna get to, is, to quote the Vice President, "A big freaking deal."

An inspiring summary of everything Obama has accomplished less than halfway through his first term.