December 13, 2010 10:10AM # President Obama, Overreacher-in-Chief By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE At the Britannica blog, [some thoughts](http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2010/12/barack-obama-overreacher-in-chief/) on President Obama, the overreacher-in-chief, at the halfway point of his administration: > In a way, you have to give [President Obama](http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/973560/Barack-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](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/01/08/conservative_libertarianisms_comeback__99823.html), 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](http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2010/12/a-forum-on-the-obama-presidency/). ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).