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Seems fashionable now to offer one’s opinion about the way things are going in President Obama’s first 100 days. I won’t disappoint.

The silly “Report Card” method is juvenile. Yet the punditocracy uses it to lump everything together akin to a rating system; one of which is used on this site. It’s not fair nor indicative of what’s going on.

It is worth wrapping constructive arguments around what went wrong in the first 100 days.

The Bank Bailout Plan

While it is true that President Obama inherited the current economy crisis we’re dealing with from George W. Bush, objectively Obama’s policies are a continuance of George W. Bush’s under Henry Paulson at Treasury and Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (or TARP) was a Bush creation of $700B in taxpayer funds to bailout major insurance underwriters and banks. The Treasury Department’s own Inspector General issued a report (PDF) on April 21 in which it proclaimed the program was mismanaged and rife with potential for fraud. When it finished that sentence it opened 20 criminal fraud investigations and also indicated there would be more on their way. The TARP program, according to a report by Ed Scheer of The Nation, is on its way to $3 trillion in bailout funding for toxic assets.

The name Henry Paulson should make you furious as a taxpayer. $328B of the first $700B was spent through March, 2009 – just 2 months after Obama took office – dating back to Fall of 2008 under Paulson and Bush, with much of those funds provided to secret recipients. By court order those recipients were finally released to the public in March after Fox Business News sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act and won. The U.S. Government turned over 10,000 mostly redacted pages regarding those TARP funds recipients, blacked out with markers, so we may never know. That does not bespeak transparency, which was a pillar in the Obama’s campaign platform during the election.

It’s also easy to point out Tim Geithner’s presidency at Treasury in New York, and Henry Paulson’s long, long relationship with Goldman Sachs, a major benefactor of the original TARP plan. The money club is exclusive, and Geithner’s position at the Fed was most certainly his calling card to the elite club. These are the types of clubs where the Ol’ Boy Network is alive, well, and thriving. So it’s no wonder Geithner has been criticized just recently for his close ties to Wall Street, and no wonder the bailouts continued under TARP under Obama at Geithner’s direction.

To Obama’s credit, what happened to the money may be just that horrible, or the redacted recipients in the report may have been a “gift” from Bush to Obama so that the American people would never know. Or it simply means he had no choice.

In the meantime, the corporate finance robber barons have absconded with their investors’ and taxpayer’s money. Should we know the truth, it’s safe to assume the anger level would hurt Obama and his chances for passing a largely populist agenda as the fury directed toward the government would cause palpable backlash (something Fox News is trying to foment).