As he completes one year in office next month, US President Barack Obama today said he rescued the economy and put it on a path of long-term growth and asserted that he did not compromise much on getting his landmark healthcare reforms through the Capitol Hill.
However, as the country heads towards the mid-term election in the latter half of 2010, he acknowledged it would be difficult to push through the unfinished items of his reform agenda next year.
Prominent among them include including cap-and-trade legislation and financial regulatory reform.
In an Oval Office interview with The Washington Post, Obama rejected criticism that he has compromised too much to secure health-care reform or turned over too much authority to Congressional leaders in pursuing his broad legislative agenda.
"Overall, if you had a checklist of promises made, a lot of those promises have been kept," he said.
"When those things are complete, and I think they will be, we will have achieved a fundamental shift in healthcare, energy, education and our financial regulatory system that will put this economy on a firmer footing to grow over the long term," he said.
According to The Post, although Obama noted in the interview that "the most important thing we did this year was to ensure that the financial system did not collapse," health-care reform dominated his agenda and will stand as at least one pillar of the legacy he leaves behind.
"Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill," Obama said. "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill," he added.
"We don't feel that the core elements to help the American people have been compromised in any significant way...Do these pieces of legislation have exactly everything I want? Of course not. But they have the things that are necessary to reduce costs for businesses, families and the government," he said.
Obama highlighted some of the less well-known measures that he said "in a normal legislative year would be considered really big achievements," The Post said.
Those include bills to ensure equal pay, expand hate-crimes categories, extend health insurance to an additional four million children, place stronger regulations on tobacco products, reform the military procurement process and implement consumer credit-card protections.
Obama also noted the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court, The Post said.
