All GOP obstructionism did was limit Obama’s legislative options. A President is not a super legislator, he is an executive. GOP obstruction still left Obama with 90% of his job to do. And that was the problem. He focused too much on what he couldn’t have, rather than focusing on what he did have: a huge administration(that he wanted to make even bigger) that he found unmanageable, and which sent his approval ratings down every time something went wrong. He was utterly uninterested in day to day management. In a President, that’s understandable, there’s no way to run such a large organization without delegating. Except with Obama, he delegated and forgot, rather than delegating and following up. Then when it blew up in his face he’d just say, “How could I have known?”
Other than the GOP obstruction, I don’t see any basis in fact. He did end the Great Recession, didn’t start any wars, and brokered the Iran nuclear agreement and climate change agreement. The ACA was, as a great man said, a big fucking deal. A GOP that was interested in serving the nation would have allowed a bigger stimulus and a more effective ACA but Obama played the hand he was dealt.
Obama did do some big things as he wanted to do. I just question whether many of them were good, and he failed to build any popular support for his accomplishments, making almost all of them reversible and rendering his Presidency irrelevant. Good Presidents ensure that their accomplishments are popular and hard to overturn. None of Obama’s accomplishments are particularly popular, and are only hard to overturn in the sense that there are bureaucratic and procedural obstacles. There is no lasting legacy as there was with FDR or LBJ. ACA can go away completely and all it would cost Republicans is one election, and it wouldn’t be coming back.
I think you’re being optimistic. When people lose their health insurance and can’t get it back, they’re going to look back and say “gee, maybe Obamacare wasn’t so bad. Maybe we were being played for suckers”. When their Medicare and Social Security gets cut, they’re going to say “how about that, Republicans did what they’ve wanted to do for generations.” A battle has been won, a war has been lost.
On ACA, Republicans will get hurt if they just repeal it and take away people’s insurance, but Democrats will not go back and try to do that whole thing again unless they feel they have the popular support this time. No party with an ounce of sense is going to lose power a third straight time over the same issue.
Now on Medicare, yeah, that’s dangerous, but that’s because Medicare, unlike ACA, was a bipartisan accomplishment with a great deal of popular support. ACA, Iran, Cuba, his various executive orders, there’s just nothing there that can’t be undone, and a lot of his accomplishments’ undoing will help Republicans, not hurt them. If repealing certain EPA regulations reopens some of those coal mines, the Republicans will own those regions for generations to come.
Until those regions become unlivable due to pollution, and the miners start dying off due to lack of safety regulations, sure. Seems rather short sighted to me though…
Overall Obama was not a good President. His foreign policy was disastrous for the country leaving the US in a weaker position, certainly in the Middle East, than when he became President. Race relations are much worse now than when he took office and his domestic achievements, if so they can be called, will all be undone by the Republican administration so in essence his only legacy to the nation is Trump.
Looking back is certainly the best way to look at Obama.
I keep seeing Obama get blamed for worsening race relations all the time. Can someone please point to me something he did or said to cause this? I don’t understand the concept even. Which speech was it where he worsened race relations? Can you quote the passage? What decision(s) did he make to worsen race relations? Can you explain the causative effect of those decisions relating to worsening race relations? To me it seems that when this claim is made it essentially boils down to the fact that he dared to become president as a black man when racist whites weren’t ready for that. I’ve heard a lot of awful racist stuff hurled in his direction the last 8 years, but for the life of me I can’t think of any examples of anything he ever did or said to worsen race relations in the US. I’m sincerely curious here.
His foreign policy is a disaster:
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Syria is a complete mess, accelerated after his “red line.”
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Putin is running roughshod over the west, in Eastern Europe, the Middle East
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Putin also seems to have influenced the election, largely because he has no fear of Obama.
The red line statement was dumb, but I’m very glad he didn’t stick to his statement – if he had, we’d have hundreds or thousands of Americans dead, likely with a more chaotic situation on the ground. The region is inherently uncontrollable from abroad, and there’s no way to predict whether military intervention will make things better or worse on the ground (except that based on recent history, it will probably make things worse).
This “no fear” thing seems ridiculous to me – bombastic rhetoric doesn’t actually cause fear, it just creates chaos. There’s nothing Obama (or any President) could have said or done, short of a massive war, that would have prevented Putin from doing what he did.
If it weren’t for the $9,000,000,000,000 increase in the national debt, I’d give him a good mark on most non-social issues, such as the economy, and on most national-security issues.
Do you expect his successor to add more or less debt than Obama? How much of the debt increase under Obama was due to Bush’s unfunded wars, his misguided tax cuts, and the unfunded prescription drug benefit?
So you are fine with the complete hands off approach that the west took in Aleppo?
I have trouble taking seriously anyone who says with confidence that doing it differently would have a specific superior outcome. I think the entire region is inherently chaotic and unpredictable to the point that it’s literally impossible to predict what the blowback and reaction will be to any given intervention.
There’s probably some action that could have had a better outcome, but I don’t believe it was possible at the time to have any idea what that action was. In such a situation, better to stay out entirely, IMO.
Wow.
Well, evil dictators practicing genocide throughout the world appreciate your continued support.
Note that I’m just talking about the middle east, but in general I do support less intervention.
That’s the main lesson this veteran (Navy) learned from the Iraq War (and Afghanistan). Reading about Vietnam reinforced this lesson as well.
The only time I might support some sort of ME intervention would be if we had a very clearly defined goal, a clear (and quick) path out once the goal is accomplished, and an international coalition. Even then I’d be skeptical.
EDIT: IIRC, you’re also a Navy vet. Our experiences may have taught us different things.
For starters how about jumping to conclusions and blaming a white cop before he knew the facts? (The Henry Louis Gates controversy). That was right at the beginning of his Presidency and showed his innate bias from the get-go. That bias showed itself in subtle ways all through his tenure, especially in the way the Justice Department acted. You don’t think race relations are worse now than they were in 2009? You don’t think he bears any responsibility at all? He was the guy in charge, the buck stops with him.
Obama showed tactical inexperience by saying publicly that the officer acted “stupidly”, but by both the arresting officer and Gates’ accounts, it’s an entirely reasonable characterization – Gates had proved he was in his own home to the officer’s satisfaction, and if he was being a jerk about it, he was being a jerk about it in his own home and there was no reasonable purpose for his arrest. The officer could have easily walked away and Gates would have shut the door, but the officer chose to arrest him for some reason, just because Gates was being obnoxious.
Accurately characterizing that may be a political mistake, but it’s dumb things like arresting black people for no reason related to public safety that makes race relations worse, not accurately describing those things as “stupid”. It’s certainly not biased to do so.
As for race relations, I don’t think they’re any worse. In some ways, they’re better – far more Americans now accept that black people are more likely to be mistreated by law enforcement today then before BLM made the issue prominent, if I recall the polling correctly.
Race relations have definitely worsened over the last few years. But anytime Obama tried to say something about race relations, even mildly, he got swatted down by upset whites. I don’t think he could have done much from the bully pulpit that wouldn’t have whites upset with him and he probably wouldn’t have been reelected. As long as he didn’t delve too much into racial stuff, white people were happy to vote for him. If he had been radical himself, he would have scared off the white folks. And I’m not sure he wanted to go much further than he did. Obama personally comes across as too passive and too willing to give whites a pass when it comes to race. Even then, the right wing was hysterical about him and Michelle, acting like they were super militant radicals. The Justice Department on the other hand managed to get some things done, including better sentencing guidelines and reducing prison sentences, especially for drugs, and turning over the dirt on racial injustices, like in Ferguson. But anything they did on racial progress still upset many whites who didn’t really want to see the ugly underbelly of racism. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of those whites were the ones who shifted from Obama to Trump
Furthermore, from aldiboronti’s own cite:
[sarc]
Sort of sounds exactly like our President-elect would do…Apologize for mistakes and then bring people together.[/sarc]