奥巴马上任一年来工作情况

Welcome back. Well, for president Obama, the campaign trail was long and hard, nearly two years of stumping before he won the big race. And what that made was a very long list of campaign promises. Twelve months later, what’s become of those pledges? What’s been kept? And what’s been broken? Candy Cowley takes a look.

stump这个动词的意思是to travel around an area, meeting people and making speeches in order to gain political support (巡回演说，争取政治上的支持)，stump本身也可以作名词，也可以解释为‘巡回演说’。

On that unusually bomby Chicago night last November, the candidate who campaigned on the fierce urgency of now became the president-elect who needed time.

The fierce urgency of now这个举行最早是出自马丁．路德．金的著名演讲《I have a dream》，是指‘当下及其紧迫的时刻’。

“We may not get there in one year or even in one term.”

A year later, president Barack Obama still needs time to turn a myriad of campaign promises into policy, and that includes some big ones—immigration reform, new financial market regulations, a gain-changing energy bill.

myriad这个词通常的句型是a myriad of或是myriads of，意思是a very large number of。

“In ten years, we will eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela.”

The list of the undones is long, varied and mostly difficult.

“I have stated repeatedly that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ makes no sense.”

But that policy remains in place. Still the president is on track to fulfilling several major promises. The majority of US troops will be called from Iraq next year though fifty thousand may remain. More troops had been sent to Afghanistan. He has ordered Guantanamo Bay prison close though he’s likely to miss his self-imposed January deadline.

self-imposed可以说是一个rule或是一个duty，这个rule或是duty是你自己规定的，没有别人非要你这么做。
 
Domestically, two issues have dominated the first ten months—health care and the economy, stoke by a nearly eight hundred billion dollar stimulus bill.

“Our plan will likely save or create three to four million jobs. 90% of these jobs will be created in the private sector.”

Here’s the thing about that. How do you count people who don’t get fired?

“The administration can claim what they like. We have no way of knowing how many jobs were actually saved as supposed to created.”

Health care is a working progress, but two of the things that president proposed in campaign—mandatory insurance and finds for people who don’t have it—are nonetheless likely to end up in the bill.

A Pulitzer Prize winning website, PolitiFact.come, tracks more than 500 Obama campaign promises. The vast majority are rated ‘NO Action’. Candy Cowley, cnn, New York.

Well, joining us now is Bill Adair, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact.com, thanks for being with us. Now, Bill, you’ve catalogued more than five hundred Obama campaign promises in your Obamater. So how is the US president doing so far?

Well, he’s made a fair amount of progress on many promises. We’ve got total of 52 promises rated as ‘Promises Kept’. We’ve got 7 as ‘Promises Broken’. And we’ve got another 14 that we’ve rated ‘compromised’. So, you know, for the first nine months or so, I think he’s made a fair amount of progress.