It was proposed that Obama would start taking Bush approaches to avoid being a Carter. If Bush didn’t do anything positive, then I don’t see the logic.
We all know Bush did shit all in office. When is this going to stop being an excuse?
I don’t recall hearing Obama say or imply any of this. Cite?
Hard to tell, unless you compare to the alternative, which is hypothetical.
Essentially, as others have observed, the US is a declining superpower. Bush tried to protect US interests by continuing to strut as a superpower, which alienated a lot of people/nations around the world, while the Obama approach appears to be based on being unthreatening, which makes a lot of nations happy. (The exceptions might be those who stuck by the US during the Bush years and then got dumped, e.g. Poland etc.)
But the fundamental question is whether this approach makes people say nice things about Obama and perhaps even feel them but also think “now here’s a guy I am not afraid to mess with” or whether it actually makes them incline to go along with his initiatives. So far there’s been a growing suspicion that the former is the case.
In sum, you need a mixture of sweet-talk and bluster. Bush may have overplayed the US blustering hand in light of the country’s declining military and economic dominance, but Obama may be underplaying it and overdoing the sweet-talk part. He might need a bit of swagger to balance things out a bit.
[Personally my own position is that the US should make clear that it is not interested in leading the Free World or any other world, and that its primary interest is in the welfare of its citizens, much like any other country. Most of the problems that people like Bush get is due to them pretending to be acting on behalf of the human race on the one hand while actually defending US interests at the same time. This leads to all sorts of bogus posturing about phony coalitions invading Iraq and the like, but more importantly provokes much of the resentment that people feel towards the US, as being sanctimonious hypocrites. If the US would do less meddling but act more narrowly in defense of self-interest, I think it would be easier.
But no president wants to do this. Any normal person would rather be the Leader of the Free World than just a president of a country, and a lot of Americans take national pride in their country’s leadership role as well.]
Never.
The Republicans have permanently lowered the bar on what a president needs to accomplish in order to be considered a success.
If you find this difficult to believe, just consider that Palin, Romney and Huckabee are serious contenders for 2012. With a bar located anywhere but in the basement that simply* could not be!*
Focus, everyone, focus.
Please let’s keep this thread along the (intentionally narrow) lines of the OP, which are…
Did Obama accomplish anything in the recent Asia trip? If so, what?
Tangental commentary welcome, snarky partisan bitching because you don’t have anything constructive to say isn’t.
Would it be a problem if there weren’t?
His accomplishements were modest, and diplomatic, exactly as they were expected to be. He made steps in repairing some of the damge done by Bush.
It’s also kind of hypcritical to call others snarky and partisan, given that tone of the your entire OP is snarky and partisan to begin with.
Not necessarily. Why, do you know of others not already mentioned here?
Post #29.
What other expectations existed in your mind?
No, I personally am gruesomely uninformed. However I felt it worth questioning what the standard was, if he has supposely not met it.
Post #30, “not already mentioned here”.
Strawman. Nobody, including me, has espoused any particular standard nor claimed it hadn’t been met.
If this was true, you wouldn’t have bothered posting the OP, because if there was no standard, it wouldn’t matter what he had done.
I should also add to my prior post that part of Bush’s problem was that he was even more naive than Obama in assigning too much importance to personal relationships between himself and other world leaders and to his assessment of those leaders. This may have led him to think he could “get away” with more than he actually could, by offsetting it with an ocasional back rub etc.
That’s an approach that may have worked well in business, and possibly in dealing with the Texas State Legislature, but it wasn’t too successfull in international relationships, or even in dealing with the US congress either.
Wrong again. If you’d like to know the reason I posted the OP you may ask me, but I assure you your conclusion, quoted here, is incorrect.
:rolleyes: Dude, I think we all know the reason, and it does not involve intellectual curiosity.
Well, in case you haven’t noticed, China just lost 104 lives in a coal mine explosion-China runs on coal. Have they announced any cutbacks in coal production?
I don’t see it.
What else did Obama accomplish? He added several thousand tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.