His interventions have been well in keeping with Teddy Roosevelt’s immemorial words “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. He has preferred to use our drones and air power rather than ground troops to achieve great aims with minimal casualties-in Libya the people asked for intervention and I suspect Syrians are thinking the same thing too. He’s not going to get into half a dozen Vietnams.
President Obama has done some good things like abolish DADT and sign the long overdue FTAs along with a solid foreign policy of low-key hawkishness but his state-oriented economic policy has not worked-he has not reformed our tax code, has added extensively to our debt, has thrown out the massive red herring of Obamacare with the unconstitutional provision of mandates and our economic recovery is sluggish to the extreme.
So basically B+ on foreign policy and a D on the economy.
I agree with the D on the economy. If only he had pushed the “Economy Fixer Button” located under the Oval Office desk, we’d be all right. But seriously, what is it that a president can do, any president, to turn around an economy ruled by complex forces that some of the smartest minds around cannot agree on or figure out? What exactly would you have him do? This country, and many others, have long histories of economic prosperity followed by downturns, recessions, and/or depressions. It seems to me we’ve had ample opportunities to figure it all out and maybe, short of truly radical techniques heretofore never tried, there just isn’t much more we can do except ride out the bad times and hope for the best. Now there’s a campaign slogan!
Not to attack you, but just the general idea that a president can have any real affect on fixing an economy.
You know, I entirely agree with you. There is an economy, and the economy goes through cycles, and I’ve never seen convincing evidence that a President or Congress can successfully intervene to prevent those cycles from happening.
But that argument is not going to help Obama for a reason that I’d think is obvious. He, his allies, and his administration have consistently told Americans to expect that such-and-such government actions will achieve such-and-such postive effects on the economy. One he says that, he can’t reasonably rely on the defense that the government can’t do much to help the economy. When the predicted effects don’t arrive, he just doesn’t have a good response, other than blaming the Republicans for not allowing even mroe government programs.
Yeah, I was embarassed the first time I read it too but after a while you get used to it. He’s also planning on creating concentration camps for conservatives who dare to criticize teh government. That’s why there is so little criticism of the government these days. Its also why he is trying to take your gun, don’t let them take your guns.
Sure, the CBO is a federal agency but they are about the most nonpartisan scorekeeper we have. Can you think of any agency with a better reputation for nonpartisanship?
Punt in the first half? The punted on the kickoff return. Then they punted on first down a couple of times after that. Sure they scored a lot of touchdowns but they happened during the commercial break so nobody really remembers them.
In what way does he fall short of an A in foreign policy? Or is B+ the cap for a a Democrat?
Most economists would disagree with your assessment of how he handled the economoy. In fact almost everything he did the first year in office re: the recession had a pretty wide consensus among economists. This includes the stimulus, TARP, and monetary policy.
Iraq, Bin Laden, DADT, Health Care, Libya, Egypt, Russian Treaty, N. Korea, change in No Child Left Behind, a couple new SCOUTS’s, a screwed up economy that is starting to turn around, quick responses to the domestic weather disasters in the south and west, and I dont cringe every time I see him on the world stage giving a speech.
Those are what I consider accomplishments or “wins”. I would like to have seen Gitmo closed, and i’m not to thrilled with some of his domestic security policies…but I support him and would love to see what he can do with a second term.
Since the repubs wont be so focused on ensuring a second term, maybe they will actually work with him on a few things. I doubt it, but it’s possible!
I assume you’re referring to the 8% unemployment thing. Which first off, was a projection, not a promise. Second off, it was based on preliminary numbers we had at the time. When the actual numbers came in, we were much, much worse off than we thought. So of course the projection would be off.
What the conservative talking heads aren’t addressing, is this means we needed the stimulus more than we thought. We were bleeding and got out a bandage, but we didn’t realize the wound went right through us and we were bleeding from the back too. The bandage wasn’t a bad idea because it didn’t stop *all *the bleeding.
In any case, the Republicans have systematically deflected everything the administration and Democrats in congress have tried to do since the Stimulus, so the blame doesn’t lay at Obama’s feet, it’s at McConnell’s shit-covered-turtle-pegs.
I was responding to Fiddle Peghead’s argument that there’s not much the President and Congress can do to boost the economy. I pointed out that it’s unreasonable to issue bold and optimistic projections about how much policies will boost the economy and then, when reality gets in the way, retreat behind the defense that it’s impossible for policies to boost the economy. In this regard, Obama’s record is unimpressive in many ways:
[ul]
[li]He passed large tax incentives and other measures that, coupled with Federal Reserve Policy, were supposed to boost the housing market. They didn’t.[/li][li]He passed the TAMP program, which was supposed to help millions of homewoners in financial trouble renegotiate their loans and keep their houses. It helped only a small number.[/li][li]He tried to include massive spending on high-speed trains, which literally and metaphorically have gone nowhere in any state.[/li][li]His green jobs and environmental policy have disappointed as well.[/li][li]His increases in education spending haven’t given him much to brag about either.[/li][/ul]
The blame-it-all-on-the-Republicans defense isn’t going to accomplish much either.