Much more at this link on Obama’s substance.

Obsidian Wings: Obama: Actually, I Think We Can

I’ll say something about the peculiar idea that Barack Obama is all style and no substance.

I came to Obama by an unusual route: as I explained here,
I follow some issues pretty closely, and over and over again, Barack
Obama kept popping up, doing really good substantive things. There he
was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called
“the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet” —
though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look — he’s over
there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn’t even heard of it, working
to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were
screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among
veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation. And there he was again, introducing a tech plan of which Lawrence Lessig wrote:

“Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for
government that could radically change how government works. The small
part of that is simple efficiency — the appointment with broad power
of a CTO for the government, making the insanely backwards technology
systems of government actually work. …”