As newly anointed President Obama stepped out onto the stage on election night with Joe Biden, it was hard to imagine that less than a year later he would be so despised. Yet here we are, watching public sentiment turn from the president and Congress amidst an increasingly explosive and confusing debate over healthcare.

As promised during the election campaign, Obama came out of the gate sprinting as he quickly announced a seemingly infallible plan to reform the health care system. He promised everything from universal coverage to a magical zero-cost plan, and for a moment it seemed as though the American people and government were ready for change.

Unfortunately for Obama, the opposition has roared up en masse in the past months. Hecklers at town hall meetings protest “socialism” and ring the alarm bell, citing death panels and the like as their reason for opposing the proposed reforms. This, of course, is madness.

Madness as it may be, it is still taking a serious toll on the campaign for reform. This makes both Americans look like idiots for falling into the propagandist trap, and it makes the Obama administration appear flustered and unorganized. This could have been avoided had the president gone about reform the right way. Instead he chose the path of Bill Clinton, which, as some may remember, was not a particularly successful one.

The first error of the administration was timing. While many so-called experts argue that Obama must get reform out of the way early in his term to avoid not getting it done at all, this strategy makes little practical sense. During a sputtering economy with unemployment almost at 10 percent and citizens scrambling to make ends meet, Obama threw out big amounts of money. This is very rarely a good idea.

Though he claims the reforms will cost the government nothing and will come solely from reforms of the system, Obama laid out the trillions that reform would amount to over the coming years. Furthermore, Obama provided nothing but his word — no facts, no statistics — to prove that the deficit would not be increased by healthcare reforms. Obama forced the American people to make a choice: do they trust him with their money or not. Even when riding on the euphoria of an election victory, a severe recession is never a good climate in which to ask people to trust you with their money.

His second error came hand in hand with the timing. Because Obama dove right into healthcare reform, he had little time to prepare a campaign. The result of this was seen weekly on the news, as members of Congress were bashed by constituents. The main cause of this was misinformation, a problem that could have easily been solved had Obama taken his time.

The president should have come out the election ready to campaign, something he tends to be rather good at. Obama should have taken at least a year to travel the country giving his oh-so-inspiring speeches to inform and persuade the American people about his plans for healthcare and how they will affect them individually. This would have prevented the acceptance of misinformation by otherwise sane, sensible people, which forms the bulk of the current opposition. As for those raucously exercising their First Amendment rights at town hall meetings, that’s pretty much hopeless.

Finally, there is the actual substance of reform. Obama chose an interesting route, which was to allow Congress to debate the actual reform while he stood on the sidelines making recommendations here and there. This plan quickly turned passive-aggressive though, as Obama refused to lay out initial plans and then critiqued ideas as they came out of Congress. This only served to confuse Congress and the American people as to what he truly wants and what he will be willing to sign.

In his address to Congress, Obama finally outlined his plan for an overhaul. This is too little too late, though, as misinformation is far too abundant to reverse with a single speech. The now infamous Joe Wilson, who shouted “You lie!” during Obama’s address to Congress, has epitomized this hysteria. It seems quite doubtful that some Americans will ever trust Obama after the rocky months of summer.

There has been much brouhaha regarding the “public option,” a plan in which the government would run a non-profit insurance company. Many have called this socialism, but in reality it is just a choice and thus cannot be labeled so. However, there is a major flaw in the concept.

Unlike other insurance companies, the government group will not have to make a profit. Although Obama claimed one of his guiding principles is that consumers do better when there is competition, the public option blatantly allows the government to offer lower prices without consequence. This is simply and purely unfair.

As we head into the fall of his first term, Obama finds himself stuck in a rut of propaganda, chaos, and what he might consider political hell. People see him differently than they did in 2008, and they don’t trust the government to take care of their money or their health.

As the weeks and months role past and nothing comes out of Congress, the situation seems more dubious than ever. American politics has become a disaster zone, struck with a partisan storm that seems without end. Every day healthcare reform is not passed it seems more likely that Barrack Obama, the man many of us paraded and rallied behind last fall, will be unable to fulfill the promises that he made just a short year ago.