In chronicling the President's achievements, it is necessary to begin with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Among the left's grievances with this piece of legislation are its stripped-down size and heavy reliance on tax cuts for near-term stimulus. I would suggest that these concerns miss the big picture in terms of what the Recovery Act was intended to accomplish in tandem with literal economic recovery and job creation, the "investment" portion, if you will.

To begin with, the bill gave $237 billion of individual tax relief targeted at the lower and middle classes. That relief was more than a campaign promise, it certainly helped many families that were on the financial brink and needed a direct infusion of cash into their pockets. It is difficult to quantify an event that never happened, but any objective observer would have predicted many additional bankruptcies in its absence.

The more direct investments in the bill gave billions in aid to states that prevented cuts of necessary services, particularly teachers. It spent more than a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure improvements from roads to the electric grid to environmental restoration, the largest such expenditure since the Interstate Highway Act (in real dollars positively dwarfing the amount given to the Public Works Administration under FDR), and creating hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs along the way.

It also served as a down payment of sorts on the president's main domestic priorities. It allocated $40 billion to energy, split between infrastructure improvements, research into more efficient renewables, and job training. It provided more money for Medicaid, paid for 65% of COBRA premiums for the unemployed, and began the key task of comparative effectiveness research, which will help doctors and patients make more efficient medical decisions. It also funded education, helping the aforementioned teachers keep their jobs, expanding Pell Grants and student loan availability, and also leveraging meaningful and needed reforms at the state level by dangling the carrot of grants through the Race to the Top program.

That was accomplished with a single signature. Other early term and first summer accomplishments included the Fair Pay Act, Hate Crimes Prevention Act, CARD Act (finally restricting credit card practices, albeit over time), and an extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

Into the new year, and after significant compromise and a bruising political fight, the President signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which for whatever flaws it may have is the single most significant health related law in our history. It will provide tens of millions of more people with access to coverage, and will on average lower premiums for most everyone else. It brings insurance companies effectively to heel, and may well be the beginning of a truly effective health insurance marketplace available to everyone in this country, and the end of the employer based system, which left and right agree is now doing more harm than good.

Only a week later, side by side with improvements on the initially deal-ridden health bill, he signed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which makes the government a direct lender instead of a guarantor of bank loans to students, cutting out the middle men, allowing for a more flexible and generous loan process and using the saved money to increase Pell Grants in both size and number.

Follow that with the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which ends the policy of "too-big-to-fail" and makes sizable firms subject to a much tougher degree of scrutiny from federal regulators, as well as provides a method to put them down peacefully should that become necessary. Added to that are the strongest financial consumer protections ever attempted by the government, a strong Volcker Rule, and direct oversight of the derivatives market, creating overall a bill comparable in scope to the Banking and Securities Acts of 1933.

If the President should accomplish nothing more at all between now and the end of his first term, he has a record of accomplishment that need not feel inadequate in the company of the New Deal and Great Society.

That nigh all of his accomplishments are imperfect is a matter of course. His illustrious forebears had to sacrifice to accomplish their goals as well, but continued to make progress on them after they were initially realized. Social Security was originally unavailable to farm workers and government employees, but was changed even within FDR's term to create a more inclusive and generous benefit schedule. LBJ sacrificed the voting rights provision in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, but came back and got his Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Discouragement about the completeness of our President's accomplishment should in no way make us disparaging of its scope. I would defy any of my readers to find a more productive congress in recent history. This is real change that is happening in our society today. And in order to continue its march, and in order for us to realize the full extent of our ambitions, we need to be not discouraged but still more excited about the ground that we have gained and are still gaining. Now is not the time to despair and turn on our own leaders. Now is the time to double down, give them the support they need in the coming elections and challenge them to continue our work.