Liberals: What do you dislike about Obama?

Politics & Elections
1

Disclaimer: I am atheist, liberal, pro science, pro marriage equality, anti drug war, pro abortion, pro immigration, pro… well, taxing the rich more and the middle class less, anti stupid-wars, etc.

I always hear how Obama and Romney get placed onto this sort of dialectic where it comes down to “picking one’s poison,” but is that really the case? Is this just a false equivalency? My current perspective of things is that Obama’s gone a great job despite all the GOP obstructionism.

He passed health care reform, stopped economic freefall with the stimulus, pushed for Wall Street reform, ended the war in Iraq, pulled back on Afghanistan, improved America’s reputation globally after the Bush years, repealed DADT, got Osama bin Laden, drafted the New START Treaty, passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, expanded Pell grants, expanded stem cell research, passed the Food Safety Modernization Act for the FDA, passed the Matthew Shepard Act, improved the unemployment rate after a major financial disaster, helped saved the auto industry, cracked down on deceptive lending practices, recapitalized banks, and lots more.

All these things I consider fantastic. However, sometimes I worry that I am falling victim to confirmation bias and would like someone to help clear the air.

What is it you guys dislike about Obama, taking into account all other relevant variables? How could he be a better President? Am I giving too much credit to Obama for certain things/ignoring others?

2

He tried too hard to compromise on taxes and health care, leading to less effective legislation (IMO) than he could have reached (note that this is a criticism on tactics, not ideology). While he has stopped the policy of torture, he has not investigated lawbreaking with regards to past instances of torture. He failed to close Guantanomo (I’m not sure if he could have, legally, based on the House opposition, but I still wish he had found a way). I find the drone program to be problematic- this is a secretive program which I don’t know much about. He’s done pretty much nothing to halt the ridiculous and crippling drug war.

I am still planning to vote for him with enthusiasm- I’m very happy with most of what he’s done, and on every one of the issues I disagree with Obama about, I believe Romney would be even worse.

3

Obama would be a wonderful Republican president. One I could respect and who could maybe make me rethink my opinion of the party. He passed health care reform, but a Republican version of it. He’s been a center right president the whole way.

4

As Presidents go, I think he is excellent and has accomplished a lot in spite of the VOWED Congressional gridlock. I don’t expect any President to be perfect or even 80% of perfect. It’s a completely impossible job, and my only problem is questioning the sanity of anyone who WANTS it.

There is an odd phenomenon in this country WRT to the President. He immediately becomes the repository and DEpository of the country’s discontent and malaise. It’s called projection. Does anyone remember how within six months of Clinton being elected, he was being blamed for everything that was wrong in anyone’s life? Does anyone remember how this country HATED the Clintons? The Whitewater scandal… the Vince Foster suicide (and there were intimations that the Clintons had him murdered)? And he didn’t get off scot free–the man was impeached, for fuck’s sake. Now he’s a hero and elder statesman. <shrug> I always liked him.

The day a woman becomes president, it will probably be worse, as the public will project upon her all the unconscious hatred and expectations that they hold for their mothers and maternal caregivers. I expect these to be many times more vicious and damaging than their Daddy issues.

Anyway, the Presidency is an impossible job, and in the face of that Obama has accomplished a remarkable series of tasks. The ACA alone is practically a miracle! When Bill Clinton put Hillary to work on surveying the country about health care reform, there was a huge outcry! Doesn’t anyone remember that?

The public focuses its current hate and discontent on whoever is President. “It’s Obama’s fault that I haven’t had a raise in five years!” Anyone who believes that doesn’t have the mental capacity to vote (and probably doesn’t deserve a raise). If Romney gets elected the same thing will happen to him; he will immediately become a scapegoat. But I won’t be here, as I will have self-deported.

5

Although I am generally pleased with his presidency, I would have done some things differently.

He bought into himself as some sort of post-partisan leader. Great idea, but when the opposition meets on Inauguration Day to sabotage your presidency, a waste of his time and effort. He should have realized from Day One that the opposition would cheerily destroy the economy in order to bring him down with it.

He should have met with Democrats early in his administration, decided what they wanted in the health care law, and the sell it to the nation. He should have fought back on the Teabaggers’ preposterous objections like “Death Panels”. He ceded the PR war to the opposition.

He should have ended the war in Afghanistan. There simply is no victory scenario. Even the USSR figured out that it was pointless to try to control that territory.

He should have gone over the Congress and made his case for the stimulus directly with the people and made it big enough to actually do something.

He should have thought of some way to prosecture Bush and Cheney for war crimes.

6

It would have been nice if he had introduced legislation to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. I hope for this in the second term.

7

I’m fairly well pissed off that we’re still in Afghanistan, I don’t like the drone program at all, and I’m mega-pissed about that executive order he issued that suspends habeas corpus for certain detainees. I also think the version of the healthcare plan that we got was a weaksauce watered-down version of what we should have got, though I am generally happy that we got anything at all, considering the obstructionist nature of this Congress.

The positives mentioned in the OP are enough to balance the negatives IMO, and I’m pretty damn sure Romney would be even worse on these issues, so obviously I’m still voting for the guy.

8

Holding people in a prison without trial is a stain on this nation’s soul that will long outlive the false sense of security we get for doing it. Yet I’m not sure what he can do with that dealt hand, so I’m not angry, just disappointed.

In general, he and his administration needs to be better at convincing Americans his course is the correct one, what he’s been doing is not enough.

9

This

The ACA as it was passed smells like a steamy hot bacon ham and sausage sandwich…during the 2008 campaign he insisted any health care plan he passed would have a public option and he laughed off mandates , saying " that would be like fixing homelessness by passing a law requiring everyone to buy a house". Well, the public option disappeared from the table pretty much the second he was actually elected.

The ACA didn’t address the federal laws ( McCarren-Ferguson, IIRC ) that exempt insurance companies from FederalaAnti-trust laws and federal oversight…currently the insurance industry is a cartel like system where the players in each state are free to collude as much as they like. The Obama administration felt that the public option would keep the state insurers competitive …and if you believe the meme about private industry being more efficient than government, the public option should’ve not even bothered the insurance companies.

But the public option went off the table and no thought was given to insurance reform that would bring the insurance companies under the control of Federal anti-trust regulations. So now we will all have to buy insurance from companies that are allowed to fix and inflate prices.

The other huge flaw with the ACA is the laws regarding Medicare payments to the pharmaceutical companies. Everytime I hear someone say that nationalized health care will be more efficient because the government has a lot of leverage to negotiate prices on pharmaceuticals I want to punch them…because there is a provision in the 2003 Medicare Act that prohibits the government from negotiating discounts on drugs…yes there is law that says the government and insurance companies offering Medicare plans have to pay full retail for pharmaceuticals…with full retail being whatever the drug companies feel like setting (and the government and insurers HAVE to buy these drugs for their patients no matter what the cost)…this is why the prices on some drugs have increased by 10x, 50x or even 100x in the past 10 years…and the reason so many medicines are unaffordable for the uninsured.

And Dodd Frank is even a worse piece of legislation…it does very little to address the institutionalized criminality that led to the financial crisis and nothing to address “to big to fail”…because, according to Jamie Dimon…hey, no BIG banks actually failed, it was just the little ones…of course they aren’t addressing the700 billion issue of why the big banks didn’t fail. And it doesn’t address the dangers posed by high frequency trading and the tangled and opaque derivatives market… and it’s provisions against proprietary trading are weak and riddled with loopholes…I think this is the biggest problem of all, the banks have turned away from the idea that their job is to make money for their depositors and are now working under the model that they make money for themselves and their shareholders at the expense of the depositor.

He also let Geitner and the boys at the Fed convince him that prosecuting the bank executives that caused the crisis would erode public trust and hurt the recovery and it was best to sweep it under the rug…fo course, the boys at the Fed are close friends of these criminals do there motives are suspect. and even when wrongdoing was so apparent that it couldn’t be ignored, as in the cases where Goldman Sachs bundled mortgages that were handpicked to fail, sold them to municipalities and pension funds, then betted against them with their hedge fund buddies…the penalties were laughably small because imposing big fines on the banks would hurt the economy ( and, we, the taxpayer, would be paying the fines with bailout money ).

Now I understand the processes that make this happen, no matter how horrible the legislation is most people just know it as" health care reform" or “financial reform” and it would be politically devasting for a Democratic senator to vote against it or a Democratic president to veto it…no matter how bad the bill is the voters will just absorb " voted against reform" when they go to pull the lever.

10

I like and agree with everything in this post. Although my enthusiasm for Obama is not so much for the man himself but because in the fairyland that is my head, if Obama gets re-elected perhaps in 2016 the democrats will nominate a real liberal and then we could really get cracking!

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  1. By continuing the Bush-era anti-terrorism tactics (rendition, I believe, plus indefinite detention, etc.), he makes it that much harder to undo. Now, it’s not a single aberration, but a policy backed by both Republicans and Democrats. The idea of indefinite detentions is so anti-American in my view – it really feels like a big step toward tyranny. It’s almost enough to make me vote Green or something. (“Sure, throw your vote away!” /Kodos)

  2. He seems to come to the table after already negotiating with himself, so that he has to meet the Republicans halfway from what should be his final offer. For example, with PPACA, the Democrats showed up with no public option, no single-payer, etc. I would think you could start with the public option, and negotiate it away in return for something.

  3. He took too long to change his mind on gay rights, but he got there eventually, so I’ll let him slide.

It’s impossible to say for sure, but I think Hilary would have done better on the negotiations, and maybe even terror stuff.

RS

12

Just to nitpick:

The complaint about the Bush policy was not “rendition” per se, which is just capturing someone and moving them somewhere else, a policy going back much further than Bush II. The complaint was “rendition-to-torture,” the procedure of capturing someone and giving them to Syria or Egypt to torture for information.
Some did complain about rendition generally, but many of us were more concerned about the “-to-torture” suffix.

(Obama has also made slight changes to the terms of detention that are all in a more civil libertarian direction, but that criticism is still quite fair IMO.)

13

Obama wanted a public option. Lieberman and a few other democrats in congress wouldn’t even consider it. So don’t blame Obama for that. If we didn’t have the stupid procedural filibuster in the senate, we would have had a public option just as Obama wanted.

Obama wanted to close Guantanamo Bay and tried, but got blocked by congress for technical reasons, mainly related to WHERE WERE THE PRISONERS GOING TO GO? He couldn’t just release them back into the world, which would have been the only way he could have closed down the prison since congress was utterly unwilling to pass legislation to get those prisoners somewhere else.

Overall, the only thing I’m upset with Obama over is that he tried too hard to work with recalcitrant republicans. He campaigned on a promise of hope and change, but he should have realized that the republicans would have none of that.

14

A fair nitpick, but then I’d like to add in my discomfort with drone strikes. I know this has been brought up in multiple other threads and I don’t want to revisit the argument here, so I’m just stating my opinion. My opinion is that drone strikes make it too easy, too risk-free for the US to take out enemies. If there are high value enemies (e.g., OBL), we would risk something to take him out. Lower value enemies, if it’s not worth risking anything at all (other than good will and reputation), they can’t be that bad. It’s making war clean and risk-free for us, and riskier for civilian and non-civilian populations alike in trouble spots.

Don’t get me started on Lieberman. However, Obama should have come to the table with his wish list, and then negotiated with his own party and the other party to find a fair compromise. Instead, he shows up with the compromise, and then negotiates with his own party, and lets the other party make further changes, and then doesn’t hold anyone’s feet to the fire when nobody (ex one or two) from the other side even votes in favor. If he couldn’t get their agreement to vote aye, he shouldn’t have allowed them to have a place at the table.

Earlier in the election cycle, I thought I wouldn’t vote for Obama, maybe vote Green or not for president at all. As time went on and he got somewhat tougher, changed his stance on gay rights, and made other adjustments, I think I’ll grudgingly vote for him.

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He’s too nice and polite. I know, that sounds ridiculous, but Bill Clinton was a charmer who could be juuuust a little bit of a bastard when he had to be.

Obama compromises when I think he shouldn’t – that whole “bipartisan” or “post-partisan” is a fool’s game. Don’t be a fool, Mr. President!

And WTF was with Rev. Jeremiah Wright? What DO you (or did you) see in that guy?

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And it all costs 6 Trillion. Give me 6 T. and I’ll do wonders.

You forgot to say he increased poverty and Gov. dependence, choked economy, screwed Health care and ME doesn’t love us in spite of his ass-kissing.

BTW he inherited 2y of Dem. controlled Congress and THEIR causing the econ. meltdown, yet he blames Bush even after 4y.

So…yeah worship the Royal Failure, I can’t.

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what is this i don’t even

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This is actually how I feel about him.

It really boggles me when people talk about how he’s “the most liberal president ever elected” and even more when they talk about how he’s not a Christian.

As a liberal atheist, I find him gaggingly Christian and very conservative. I do appreciate the stance he’s taken on gay marriage and women’s rights, but the continued incarceration of people who’ve not been given trial, our military interventions, and his use of drones are disgusting and borderline intolerable.

That being said, I think he’s the best president I’ve seen in MY lifetime, aside from Clinton, so there you are. He’s just not very liberal :stuck_out_tongue:

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It’s just a testament to how far right-wing conservatives are these days, honestly.

Obama and Clinton were two of the most moderate, centrist presidents we have ever had… but the right-wingers are completely oblivious to that point.

Someone here once posted about how the right hate Obama because he is a left-wing socialist, wealth re-distributor, atheist, anti-corporation, etc…, and the left hates him because none of that is true. One of my favorite insights.

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What I don’t like about him

He seems to overestimate his charm and underestimate how much his opposition hates him and wants to embarrass/defeat him. Sometimes I feel like he treats his liberal base as a bunch of low information simpletons who can always be brought back to the fold with a high minded speech that has no substance. Or that he has no idea that the GOP senators he keeps trying to win to support his laws are so opposed to him they’ll vote against their own laws to make him look bad. Large numbers of republican voters thing Obama is the antichrist, or a muslim or foreign. Republican law makers aren’t going to cooperate with someone if their base will destroy them for compromise with someone like that. Dick Lugar was kicked out of office for cooperating with Obama to reduce the number of unsecured nuclear weapons in Pakistan. That is how nuts the GOP base has gotten, cooperating with Obama to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism is considered treason.

He doesn’t seem too good at one on one politics, from what I’ve read about him. He doesn’t do a good job of building good interpersonal relationships in DC which makes bill making harder. He isn’t Bill Clinton or LBJ.

He doesn’t use his executive powers as much as he can or should. He could use his executive powers for recess appointments, ending prosecutions under DADT until the law was repealed, stop DEA raids of marijuana dispensaries, etc.

Health reform was a great first step. But it is a center right health reform no different than what Romney proposed in MA or what the GOP in the senate proposed in the early 90s to oppose Clinton’s health reform. There is a lot of improvement to do on that law. Add a public option tied to medicare, allow Rx reimportation, allow Rx negotiations, more comparative effectiveness,

When Obama had supermajorities in congress he didn’t do much for labor or the working class, at least from what I know. The EFCA was just a talking point until the primaries were over. So was raising the minimum wage again (although doing those things in a terrible economy might not be a good idea). Health reform and payroll tax cuts helped them. but he didn’t do anything to help balance the power between employers vs employees or reduce income inequality.