And of course companies often improve their solvency by increasing revenues.
More lame excuses. Obama would be a success if only Congress wouldn’t kneecap him. Oh, and those 33 mean state governments too that won’t help him implement the ACA. THe problem with that is that the Presidency is a co-equal branch of government with its own unique responsibilities, most of which are not dependent on Congress or the states in any way. He is doing no better at those parts of his job. What has he done to make government work better? Bill Clinton made that his very first priority, assigning Al Gore to his Reinventing Government initiative and saving taxpayers billions. Has Obama made any real allies in his foreign policy? Most Presidents become identified with a foreign leader, like Reagan to Gorby, Clinton to Rabin, Bush to Blair, and those partnerships end up having major consequences. Who is Obama close to? Has Obama made any progress on foreign affairs issues at all? I’d say he’s done no harm, so that puts him ahead of Bush, at least, but has he actually accomplished anything? How about the day-to-day management of the executive branch agencies? Are they functioning properly, or are we seeing weekly news stories about major failures all over the executive branch? That one answers itself.
He’s failed or been poor at all of the tasks that don’t depend on Congress or the states. That’s because as a career legislator with no management experience, he sees his job as primarily political: get legislation passed. Which of course, does mean you need to have a cooperative Congress. And since his supporters are willing to judge the man by HIS criteria, obviously it’s not his fault that he’s failing.
That attitude was there from the start. His supporters like to say that he put all these Republican ideas into bills, and he himself has made that argument in public and in private to Republican legislators. THe flaw in that argument is that Republicans didn’t actually ask for those items in the bills, they asked for different things, which were almost uniformly denied. You don’t “negotiate” by preemptively deciding what the other side wants, while disregarding what they are actually asking for. That kind of stupid diplomacy doesn’t work domestically, and it certainly doesn’t work in foreign policy, which probably explains that lack of accomplishments on the foreign front either.
And that’s exactly the attitude that would continue if Liz Warren was elected President.
He is a success. He’d just be more of one.
My but it was a small and uncomplicated nation in those days.
This was a former Governor, well trained in running a government.
I guess that depends on what your goals are and how low you set the bar. He’s better than Bush, and he did pass some legislation that his supporters liked. But how well is he implementing that legislation? the very existence of the Occupy movement suggests that reforming the financial industry is not among his successes, despite major legislation addressing that problem. ACA implementation is a train wreck. His environmental initiatives are ham-handed and get struck down by the courts a lot.
So I have to wonder, what as President is he doing that is making you happy aside from not being a Republican?
I remember that very well, thus my comparisons of Obama to Reagan. Reagan had an excuse: he was old and never was a very diligent worker. He left things to subordinates almost completely, and was proud to admit that he did so, at least until it bit him in the ass.
Obama’s supporters claim he’s smart, a hard worker, yada yada, yet what’s he working on? What is he learning? He’s been doing the same things for years now without getting different results. He obviously is smart, and he obviously is a diligent worker, but he just doesn’t have the experience to do his job.
His supporters can’t claim he’s not responsible, because he’s quick to take credit on the rare occasions that something useful does come out of the bowels of the bureaucracy. He’s been touting the VA catching up on its huge backlog as if he personally made it happen. So he either has control of this stuff or he doesn’t.
Why are you people still engaging him? Seriously.
And yet Reagan can be out of control and you come up with excuses why it’s OK. It’s OK that he’s lazy and won’t take responsibility for something he ordered.
It’s OK that he’s senile but won’t step down but runs the country on advice from his wife and an astrologer.
Not OK, but at least his supporters weren’t claiming Reagan was something he wasn’t. Obama’s supporters are the most deluded people I’ve ever seen. Their view of the man is the exact opposite of reality, and I’ve never seen that before. Which is probably why they have to make so many excuses for him.
Were you even alive during the '80s? Reagan’s supporters did not admit that he was old and not very diligent; they thought (and still do) that he ended Communism through the sheer force of his will.
Which is not a contradiction. But no one ever accused Reagan of being an intellectual or a hard worker, and his dementia was starting to creep in.
Reagan was a great president, and the nice thing about great Presidents is that you don’t have to protect them from every criticism. No one needs to protect Bill Clinton from accusations of dishonesty or philandering either. But Obama, every criticism of him is met with cries of “No! Liar! False!” unless that criticism is coming from his left. You’d think that only liberals had good reason to be angry with him. Except they aren’t, so their criticisms are with kid gloves.
This thread is amusing the same way Public Access television is.
I do like how carefully you couched that to set aside all the stuff he actually passed in order to focus on the implementation where the fundamental problems are the endless Republican attempts to repeal, dismiss or otherwise hamstring the things he has accomplished.
But let me give you a list - just off the top of my head - of some of what I consider his more important accomplishments:
- PPACA. Sure, it’s a mess of Blue Dog compromises and rehashed Republican ideas, but it’s the first real success at getting any sort of healthcare reform through since Teddy Roosevelt first broached the subject.
- **Kept GM and Chrysler from going down and taking what was left of the US economy with it. ** When I think of Romney’s “just let them go bankrupt” plan, I thank the God I don’t believe in that he didn’t even make the final cut in 2008.
- **Removed the banks from student loans. ** This has been a pet peeve of mine since my own college days - the banks added a layer of bureaucracy and increased costs without adding value. I can’t believe this took so freaking long.
- Stopped torture at Gitmo. It saddens me that Gitmo is still open but at least the worst excesses of the previous administration has stopped. A small win.
- Ended the war in Iraq and is winding up the one in Afghanistan. You may argue that any president would have done that, but given the saber-rattling amongst Republicans about Iran I remain unconvinced that a different president would have given us less war. Speaking of which…
- Kept the US involvement in Libya minimal but effective. The UK and France were driving Western involvement on this one, and instead of the usual US bullshit machismo approach, Obama let them lead. And while the jury is still out on Libya, there is a sizable portion of the population that is grateful to the US and Europe for assisting in the removal of Qaddafi.
- **Took a more sensible approach to Iran. **One wonders whether the GOP are deliberately inciting war or are just fucking clueless when they publicly talk about how we should just invade and bomb Iran unless they do what we want, given that such rhetoric always strenghtens the extremists and weakens the moderates in Iran. Quiet but firm diplomacy backed up by sanctions has been more effective than frat-boy tactics.
- Repealed DADT and removed government support for DOMA. This took a lot longer than I wanted but it happened and I’m happy about it.
- Killed Osama bin Laden. Not personally, obviously, but had major decision-making role in what happened and assumed a lot of political risk in doing so. Got it done.
- Got rid of all the Bush anti-science policies, and particularly the ban on stem cell research. Seriously - the potential benefits in this area of research are freaking HUGE; refusing to encourage it is just short-sighted idiocy.
- **Smacked down BP and its cohort for the Gulf oil spill. **Too many Presidents have given these companies a slap on the wrist for major environmental disasters. Obama made them pay for this one.
- Signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act.- **Undid a lot of the damage to America’s reputation caused by the previous administration. **You have no idea how often I had to apologize for Bush to foreigners when he was in office; the “Coalition of the Willing” was a farce that no one believed (or at least no one outside the US).
And that’s not including the economy going from fast freefall to slow but steady recovery. And he did all that in the face of one of the most obstructionist Congresses in history. Frankly I think history will be very kind to him.
Of course, a lot of that is because the criticisms of him from the right ARE lies and falsehoods. Obama was not born in Kenya, he’s not a Muslim, he’s not a socialist nor is he a fascist. His healthcare plan contains no death panels, he wasn’t voted into office by illegal immigrants committing voter fraud via ACORN, he’s not secretly working with the UN to put his opponents into prison camps, he’s not planning on confiscating everyone’s guns, he didn’t sit around watching the events in Benghazi via remote drone while ordering back any assistance and he didn’t order the IRS to investigate Tea Party groups. He’s not even particularly liberal nor by any means “the worst president ever”. Sure, there have been legitimate criticisms from the right but these are mere motes in the tsunami of liquidified bullshit that the right have produced about him. Is it any wonder that those of us in the “reality-based community” spend so much time calling them on it?
Really the question ought to be: why are you okay with all the lies and falsehoods just because they’re aimed at Obama? You certainly repeat enough of them.
Welcome to adaher-istan! That magical place where anything can become a fact* if you simply continue to repeat it over and over (and over and over) again!
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'Cause fighting ignorance means confronting it. Or maybe just 'cause we’re all easily bored.
And the latest stories of administration screwups? Obama didn’t know nuthin’, right?
Now he’s actually got Democrats serious about investigating the administration. That can’t be good.
Is it really that difficult to provide a few links?
I wouldn’t think headline news about the latest revelations would require links.
OK, so now you’re blaming Obama for passing the Patriot Act?
With so much manufactured outrage, it’s hard to tell which one you’re referring to.
From your link.
So some of this goes back before Obama was sworn in.
I see nothing in the article that mentions involvement by the White House.
i also don’t see where Democrats are specifically investigating as opposed to being members of the committee doing the investigation.