At the Britannica blog, some thoughts on President Obama, the overreacher-in-chief, at the halfway point of his administration:

In a way, you have to give President Obama credit. In the face of manifest public opposition to most of his high-profile policies — the health-care bill, the automobile company takeovers, cap-and-trade, higher government spending — he pressed on and passed much of his ambitious, unpopular agenda. He said he’d rather be a “really good one-term president” than a “mediocre two-term president.” He may still escape that choice. But he certainly demonstrated that he was willing to sacrifice dozens of Democratic congressional seats in order to get a permanently larger federal government.…

As David Paul Kuhn wrote at RealClearPolitics, Obama’s activist agenda “has revived the enduring American challenge to the state.” Some of us hope that that revival of the small-government impulse in American politics — after the desert of the Bush years — will be President Obama’s most lasting legacy.

More Britannica bloggers on the first two years here.