I've been waiting anxiously for someone to write this article, and Newsweek columnist Andrew Sullivan has finally done it.

Obama, Sullivan argues, could be a transformational president on par with former President Ronald Reagan if he is re-elected to serve a second term. But an unenthusiastic left and a bitter right threaten his chances for a second term because both sides are high on misinformation.

Sullivan is dismayed by an extreme left who talk as if Obama has betrayed them because he hasn't addressed all of their pet causes. They accuse him of sucking up to Wall Street and failing to push aggressively for a single-payer health care system.

And he is discouraged by many conservatives who describe Obama as a radical who has turned the country into a welfare state. And they claim, Sullivan says, that the president doesn't know how to run a business, much less a country.

Obama is not a socialist, and as many on the left have discovered, he's not even that liberal on some issues. He's tried to govern from the center after inheriting some of the worst domestic and foreign policy messes in American history.

Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, Sullivan says, have failed to grasp the severity of the country's economic problems and what caused them. And they don't understand how our government works well enough to appreciate the limitations of his power to deliver change when the country is so politically polarized.

Sullivan is critical of Obama for his venture into Libya and for dismissing the Bowles-Simpson debt commission. But he also says the president isn't getting the praise he deserves for job creation, turning around the US auto industry and shrinking the size of government. Even "the great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than his critics have claimed," writes Sullivan, rightly pointing out that much of the program was first pioneered by staunch conservatives.

Obama, as Sullivan asserts, may be a transformational president. He has steered the country through some dire straits. And he is shifting the country away from the failed trickle-down economics that began under Reagan, offering government collaboration with the private sector as a model for the future.

I could list my own complaints about Obama: the buildup in Afghanistan, for starters. But the alternative is a GOP that offers nothing beyond the singular focus of defeating a Democratic president.