Yes, Clinton was able to raise taxes early on, and the PAYGO rule active then (passed in 1990) kept Congress from breaking the bank. And then there was the dotcom bubble.
Are we bragging about bubbles, now?
Why am I having this conversation in a Jeb Bush thread?
Yep, although in fairness to Reagan and Bush 41, and virtually any President, all Presidents inherit bad stuff and good stuff, and all have their strengths and weaknesses. Reagan-Bush restored America’s confidence and guided us through the end of the Cold War and the first post-Cold War crisis. They were obviously very weak on managing the country’s finances. Bill Clinton was not. But Clinton did inherit a confident, innovative America that was at peace and in a dominant world position. Clinton would not have been so successful had he inherited Jimmy Carter’s America.
Good thing we had Bush to pull us out that mess.
Yeah, about that…
The next President really has their work cut out for them. 16 years of bad leadership hasn’t been seen since LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter. It’s going to take a Reagan to get our mojo back. Or perhaps a Sanders if you are of the left wing persuasion. As skilled as Clinton is, I don’t think their strengths lie in rebuilding the confidence of a demoralized country. They are technocrats. At least she’ll probably fix the VA, so that’s something.
Hardy har har. Unemployment drops during Obama’s terms, stock market soars. Inflation not a worry. Fewer body bags coming back from Asia. Marriage equality now the law of the land. No more getting turned down for insurance due to pre-existing conditions. Millions more people insured. Iran nuclear ambitions peacefully held in check. Normalizing relations with Cuba. Yes, we had 8 years of bad leadership coming into 2009, but Obama has managed to do a lot with zero Republican cooperation. If Obama’s leadership was bad, give me 8 more years of bad.
Then why does the vast majority of the public think we are still headed in the wrong direction? Why are even a large percentage of Democrats looking for change in the White House? Why the sudden rise in civil disobedience from sources to the left of the Democratic Party?(Occupy and BLM). Democratic voters love President Obama, but that’s more a personal thing. Dislike for “the government” seems to be the same as it was under Bush. Except now Democrats say “the government” instead of “Bush administration”. “the government” wants to hack our iphones., “the government” is spying on us, yada yada. Democrats are still royally pissed off, they just don’t blame Obama for their anger. While everyone else does.
It’s true that Obama’s Presidency hasn’t been an unmitigated disaster as GWB’s was. But there are a lot of things that have gotten worse or been totally unaddressed, and that will be a major challenge for the next President. Multiple dysfunctional agencies, most notably the VA but hardly limited to the VA, a huge deficit problem(the deficit is expected to start rising again in only a few years due to entitlements), the war on terror, plus rising geopolitical threats in Vladimir Putin and an increasingly assertive China that is now facing demographic and economic problems.
As I noted in another thread, you can cite polls stating that 25% of “the public” hold Obama responsible for Katrina. :smack:
Getting to your “things that have gotten worse”, specifically:
Just WHAT was Obama supposed to do to curb THAT? And please, no generic “be a real leader” crap.
The public always says the country is going in the wrong direction. Democrats are looking for a change in the White House because Obama can’t run again. If he could, he wins easily. Republicans have hated him from day one because of the racist base of the party. Sudden rise in civil disobedience? Occupy Wall Street was so 2011. BLM rose because police brutality and murder is now recorded and broadcast. If you want to eliminate the deficit, repeal the Bush tax cuts. Cut the military. Do something, but for the moment nothing can be done because Republicans exist. Even eliminating the deficit would not provide one single job, so why obsess over it? Or kids are not going to pay for it, neither are our grandkids and great grandkids. Paying it off requires running surpluses, which Republicans will not allow to happen.
My guess would be that they own calendars and are aware of the 22nd Amendment.
Oh, no doubt, but there’s a difference between having a plan and being engaged and treating it as an inconvenience distracting you from what you’d rather be doing and be purely reactive. I don’t consider Obama’s foreign policy to be a “failure”. He’s kept to his policy of “don’t do stupid shit”. But he also hasn’t actively made progress on the big upcoming issues, nor even really tried. Hillary is likely to be a lot more forward thinking, assertive, and proactive. The Republicans, who knows, since none of them have foreign policy experience.
And of course there are other things, things that liberals are still mad about, like inequality, Wall Street, health care, etc., and in all of those cases Obama has implemented solutions that haven’t really satisfied anyone. Liberals laud Obama for what he’s done, but at the same time act as if very little progress has been made.
If Obama had actually done as great a job as many of his fans claim, then there wouldn’t be a race for the Democratic nomination. Clinton is all but promising to BE Obama in terms of continuing his policies, but a large minority of Democrats consider that to be insufficient.
Possibly, but that wouldn’t actually make Democrats happy. And the public does often see things as going in the right direction. Well, not often, but during much of the Reagan and Clinton administrations Americans were pretty happy with the way things were going.
Funny thing is, it’s hard to get Obama fans to admit that even Clinton was a better President.
Focus, people. This thread is about poor, departed JEB.
There are other places to fight other battles. This ain’t the place for them.
My apologies for riding the tangent train.
Back to Jeb! He certainly seemed to think he was inevitable, but he always seemed like his heart wasn’t in it. Presidentin’ is the family business, but I never got the impression that he was passionate about wanting it. He never seemed to recover from the early stumble about whether he thought the Iraq war was the right thing to do. But in the end he was like the guy trying to sell hot chocolate in Death Valley- he was selling the old guard while the public wanted radical change. He wasn’t selling what they wanted and they weren’t buying what he was selling.
He waited too long. 2012 was his year. He and Romney would have had a nice dogfight. But I think what it really comes down to is that he didn’t have the fire in the belly. He just kept getting asked by party power brokers cycle after cycle, “Hey, you gonna run?” and eventually he said yes. But I never got the impression he was really committed to it.
Had Trump not run, he might have had a chance. Trump essentially took him out last summer, announcing the day after Bush did, sucking all of the oxygen out of the room and then attacking him relentlessly over the summer. Perhaps if Bush had punched back last year he may have had a chance but he seemed to serve as nothing more than Trump’s foil.
Geez, it’s so hard to figure out what the race would have looked like without Trump. It’s hard to imagine that a few years ago we looked at our 2009 and 2010 victors and saw Presidential candidates. Now only Kasich, Rubio, and Cruz are left standing.
I liked this stretch of the latest Can’t Stump the Trump video, especially where he uses old clips of Jeb whining to contrast with Trump’s SC win. In the end, Jeb’s $100 million campaign was reduced to a guacamole bowl meme.
Someone should make a compilation of all the times Trump kicked sand in Jeb’s face. This was the funniest I think, but the crack about how his mom should’ve run instead of him was savage too.
I don’t know that Jeb wasn’t committed, I think Trump just completely derailed Jeb’s path. Trump brought eyeballs to the debates, where Jeb was not strong. In a contest to see who can be more bombastic, Jeb got his ass kicked time and time again. He thought slow and steady would win the race, but Trump roared past in a Lamborghini. Whatever worked for Romney, McCain and GWB to win their primaries is not the template for 2016.
It’s tempting to follow that line, but you’d think that Jeb could at least have dominated the other “establishment” candidates if Trump was really what derailed his campaign.
Overall I agree, but Trump did seem to especially target Jeb! for the personal attacks.
None of the conventional candidates were going to thrive with Trump onstage. His bombastic anti-policy pronouncements neutered all of them.