A few things to keep in mind. First off, the President appoints judges and justices, but in no way does he guide them once they've been appointed. When appointing these positions, the best the President can do (keep in mind they have to be confirmed by 2/3s of the Senate) is to try to pick someone who will not undo years of jurisprudence the President agrees with. Once the position has been appointed, the President no longer has any control, and I believe the evidence says Presidential initiatives have both been supported and torn down at various times by the same judges and justices they've appointed.

Additionally, the President is the leader of his party,but there is a significantly greater power to being the leader of the Republican party than that of the Democratic party. This is because the Democratic party is much more fragmented and pulls from a much wider pool of underlying ideas than does the Republican one, so legislators representing their communities will be much tougher to keep on a coherent party message on a given issue. This is why, despite the strong hand he was dealt, the healthcare package passed by the Congress was lackluster at best: the Republican support was uniformly against it, while the Democratic support was extremely fragmented.

The President gets a free pass insofar as one has to look and see whether he's used the tools at his disposal to try to guide things in the right direction. You don't judge him by the result, but by whether he did what he could to influence it “correctly”, no matter what the result ultimately was. In the specific case of lobbying/corruption, mind you, I think (a) the evidence is unclear-to-negative and (b) Obama quickly decided to lose the focus on that in favor of trying to pull out of the recession as best he could and passing some of his legislative priorities. Whether the latter was a good decision or not is definitely up for debate. In a similar vein, the civil rights verbiage from the campaign for the most part went into a tailspin within a year of his taking office.

All great points and a finer tooth comb of nuances than my own analysis :)

It all goes to show that the system in Washington is a complex piece of machinery that requires a hacker mentality to succeed. I absolutely and truly believe that the same mentality that makes great programmers also make great political operatives. Regardless of political ideology, I think we, as a community, can get involved to a much larger degree to help influence and shape the world from the other side of the business/government divide.

Definitely true. I think, unfortunately, that it seems like the hacker mentality also lends itself more to cynicism, and the end result is that the hacker mentality lends itself more to a bit of fatalism when it comes to the government. That, combined with the (less pronounced, perhaps) tendency of the hacker mentality to dovetail with introversion, makes it harder for the hacker community to get involved in that sense.

That sounds cynical, of course. I do think we can get better :) And I think SOPA for one was a great example of the community going “hang on just a second here…”

First, the president's only legislative power is the power of the veto. He can't sign a bill that isn't presented to him, so if congress never presents a lobbying reform bill, he never gets to sign it.

Secondly, the purpose of the judicial system is not to "legislate from the bench." It is to strike down unconstitutional legislation. Despite what some recent conservative appointees have decided their role is. Off topic, but I do find it somewhat telling that the few federal judges who think it is their moral right to legislate from the bench usually are deeply involved in right wing religion and other forms of crazy.