Yet another indication that Obamamania has gone way overboard. No sensible person evaluates the quality of a President using such a standard.
I am a fan of Obama, I like the guy a lot, but expectations are a little artificially high - at least among a lot of people. See banner ads like this. That came off one of the top 10 most popular websites in the world.
Meeting ridiculously high expectations is a problem in American politics, because the candates fosters them.
When Senator Obama (and Senators Clinton and McCain) were running for office, they promised to be all things to all people. They all wanted to save the economy, cut taxes and trim the budget deficit for example. Patently can’t happen, but they were all going to do it.
Only problem is that one of them was going to get elected, and those same expectations that the candidate and his handlers fostered, aren’t so ealily forgotton.
Yeah, I’ve seen one that was like that too, presumably to get government money that may or may not even exist.
Some people see the door of opportunity open up to conduct scams anywhere.
Jthunder, Spidey met Stephen Colbert before the election!
I saw an article this morning that read something like ‘Obama has 4 years to save the world’ (it was an article about global warming btw). When I saw this thread it made me remember it. Think about it…OBAMA has 4 years to save the world. How could any man meet those kinds of expectations. People really think he can do everything, and do it right now, this minute!
No one could meet the expectations of some of the more fervent of the Obama faithful. He almost has to fail to meet such ridiculous expectations. That aside, he’s doing a pretty good job of meeting my own, more subdued expectations.
-XT
If he leads us, we can do it. We’re the Americans, if it can be done, we can do it. If it can’t be done, there’s an even chance we can do it anyway.
WOW!!!
Seriously though, I hope that was a joke on your part. Colbert was not a candidate, and he had a successful TV show long before the election. As far as I can tell, he didn’t appear on the cover of the Spider-books… certainly not in any prominent way. It’s a safe bet that Colbert wasn’t given the same degree of exposure that Obama has been given.
Now, if newspaper headlines had been reading “Spider-Man Meets Stephen Colbert!” then that would be another matter altogether.
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/100801-ASMColbertCover.html
Colbert was briefly a presidential candidate. Don’t you remember?
In the Marvel Universe, Colbert was an actual candidate, as opposed to his brief run in reality. He had the backup story in Amazing Spider-Man 573, before the Obama issue, had the variant cover like Obama did, and his issue sold out, too.
See? Variant cover for Obama.
http://www.justpressplay.net/movies/tv/4060-stephen-colbert-meets-spider-man.html
By your command, I display the exact headline you requested.
This is exactly as serious as Stephen Colbert is.
I have to say, the bar has been set very low. The first time I saw Obama speak (thanks Google video), my first reaction was “Wow, he’s smarter than me.” Forgive such fans as myself, who are tickled pink that we have a President that can think AND speak, in coherent sentences. He also happens to have genuine affection and respect for his wife, who might actually be smarter than him. He created a campaign that is unsurpassed in our history, both in fundraising and ground support. He has maintained his composure through some serious mudslinging.
If you ask me, which of course, no one really has, he has already raised the bar higher than it has been in quite some time. I see no real reason for that to change. From what I can tell he is taking the job absolutely seriously and being very diligent in maintaining the standards that HE has set. And yeah, he ain’t even a week into this thing yet.
And he has the cutest kids, evah!
Obama has already accomplished wonders, even without doing a whole lot. You don’t have to be a policy wonk. You don’t have to have great experience. All you really need to be is a decent person, fairly patriotic, smart enough to know when to call in other experts for help, and willing to try to bring arguing people together to encourage them to talk and, possibly, compromise.
Obama blows by that by a country mile. He’s both intelligent AND educated, he is a constitutional scholar, as opposed to someone whose lackey called the Constitution “quaint.” He’s willing to piss off the gays, and I’ll wager he’ll piss off the greens, and the dems, the republicans, conservatives and liberals. IMO, if he ends up pissing off all of our little special interest factions, he’ll probably have done a good job. The Presidency isn’t a prize where the winner gets to dole out prizes to his faithful supplicants and torture his enemies. It’s an executive position requiring that you try to keep 300 million yahoos working together to keep this country from driving off the edge of the cliff we’re so close to right now. Maybe, just maybe, he might help us get pointed to a path towards prosperity again.
My thresholds for Obama’s success are small, and my confidence in him is great. We are closing down Guantanamo. We’re putting limits on lobbyists. We’re closing down the CIA’s secret prisons. And, though he hasn’t done this yet, I believe we’re going to go back to the time when FISA courts were required to sign off on wiretaps of US citizens.
I don’t think I’ll be disappointed in Obama if we’re still in a full-blown recession or have double digit inflation four years from now. The previous administration fucked things up so badly that, really, just stopping us from digging the hole even deeper is enough for me.
Some comedians have joked about it: the country’s so screwed up that we decided, hell, let’s elect the black guy. That’s partially true. We had good will, some wealth and some silver bullets seven years ago, and Bush alienated our friends, spent our wealth, and shot off our silver bullets because they looked shiny. We’re up against a wall, and I think both parties know it.
After the 2004 election, Bush said that his election showed that he had “political capital,” and that he was going to spend it. Obama got elected and acknowledged that we put our faith in him, that he was going to try to earn it, but that he was going to need our help. Just phrasing the issue that way gives me hope. Bush governed as if he were a ruler; Obama gives every impression that he’s going to govern as a manager.
So, sorry; I never thought he was the messiah or that he could leap tall buildings in a single bound. I just hoped we’d get a decent man and an honest broker.
Good one, although it was, in the end, exchanging Cuba for Turkey.
He didn’t just convince Khruschov.
The missiles in Turkey were of the Jupiter series, rapidly becoming obsolete. It was a gesture to allow Krushchev to save face.
That reminds me of a Bill Maher skit in which he essentialy says “I wish Republicans who get all huffy about Clinton getting blown in the Oval Office would realize that means he didn’t even leave his office for 5 minutes to fuck. Now is that commitment to work or what ?!” 