That’s their goal, not their message. Given that recent speeches by some of the more radical folk have attempted to tie Obama to Bush’s (more aggressive) policies, I suspect they’re worried that Obama’s “Actually, America doesn’t hate all Muslims” message will catch on.
Nothing will stop the lunatic fringe, of course, but it’ll make their job harder.
I’m not a fan of Obama, but you don’t need experience to get things done. All you need is the ablity to hire people to do that for you.
Sorry, Sam, but I think the mistakes are yours.
That assumes that he believed it would be a simple affair — that he would just stretch out his arms and declare, “Be thou closed, thou foul place!” What you are calling “backpedalling” is what I would call “taking action”. Obama is a pragmatist and a moralist. He knows (just as you and I know) that Gitmo must close down for many reasons, varying from the fact that a lot of innocent people have been processed there to the fact that America has always been the beacon of goodness for the world. And Gitmo is good for nothing but recruiting terrorists. Therefore, we would expect our president, no matter who he or she might be, to announce, as soon as possible, the closure of Gitmo. It is then up to the underlings to see that it gets done.
He never said anything about the “various executives” that average Americans weren’t saying. His condemnations were of excessive greed by executives who used golden parachutes to abandon companies that they knew for a certainty would fail. It was the SEC under Bush that was responsible for much if not most of that.
Due respect, but that’s a gratuitous statement without anything to back it up. His Secretary of State was presented to the full Senate by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was confirmed on Jan 21. His Secretary of the Treasury was presented to the full Senate by the Senate Finance Committee, and was confirmed on Jan 26. South Carolina’s Republican Senator, Lindsay Graham, said Geithner was “very, very competent” and “the right guy” for the job. His Secretary of Defense submitted his resignation, which was declined, on the day of Obama’s nomination, in a formality procedure. Secretary Gates did not require Senate confirmation.
His Attorney General was presented to the full Senate by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and was confirmed on Feb 2. (The first African-American Attorney General of the United States.) His nomination for Secretary of the Interior was presented to the full Senate by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. He was confirmed by unanimous vote on Jan 21. His Secretary of Agriculture was presented to the full Senate by the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, and was confirmed on Jan 20 by a unanimous vote.
His Secretary of Commerce was presented to the full Senate by the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. He was confirmed on Mar 24, and was the first Chinese-American in the cabinet (and the third Asian member). His Secretary of Labor was presented to the full Senate by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and was confirmed on Feb 11 by a landslide margin. His Secretary of Health and Human Services was prsented to the full senate by the Senate Finance Committee (after the traditional vetting by the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions), and was confirmed Apr 28.
His Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was presented to the full Senate by the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and was confirmed on Jan 27. His Secretary of Transportation was presented to the full Senate by the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and was confirmed on Jan 23. Secretary LaHood is a Republican. (As is Secretary Gates.) His Secretary of Energy was presented to the full Senate by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and was confirmed by unanimous vote.
His Secretary of Energy, a Nobel Laureat, was presented to the full Senate by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and was confirmed by unanimous vote on Jan 20. His Secretary of Education was presented to the full Senate by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and was confirmed on Jan 21. His Secretary of Veterans Affairs was presented to the full Senate by the United States Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, and was confirmed on Jan 20. Finally, his Secretary of Homeland Security was presented to the full Senate by the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and was confirmed on Jan 21.
Where, in any of these facts, is there evidence that his vetting process was as you described it: “clumsy at best”? His vetting processes have in fact been extraordinarily efficacious.
With respect, I’m beginning to wonder whether you have anything besides the Fox News talking points to offer here. The president has blamed no one for anything, and has taken upon himself the responsibility for every screw up from Biden’s Roberts joke to a couple of early cabinet appointments. All he has ever said that even remotely resembles your description are references to the deficit, the off-budget funding, and the general messiness of the Bush economy. And why should he lie about those?
That’s the only thing you’ve mentioned that closely resembles the truth. However, it wasn’t Pelosi and Reid who ran over him; rather, it was John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor — not to mention Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, both of whom announced openly that they hoped his policies would fail, and that therefore we would all suffer a terrible economic collapse. Luckily, there are signs of economic recovery, and the joker who leads the RNC, Michael Steele. Dear Jesus. But Obama’s only fault in regard to his dealings with Congress was to trust the sincerity of Republican leaders.
So was McCain. All he communicated was bumper-sticker slogans like, “Drill, baby, drill!”
Thanks for the post. If you get a chance, you should take a look at the June 7 article in the Times Magazine I mentioned. I assume it is on their website. I read the print one.
As for trusting the sincerity of Republican leaders, who knows how much he really trusted them? Whether he did or not, starting from a position of trying to involve them in the process was the right thing to do. If you remember, the polls after the vote in the House on the stimulus bill showed that the Republicans were thought to be playing politics without regard for the country. I think Obama’s numbers would have gone down if he had tried to exclude them from the start. There are certainly those who think that the bill that eventually got passed might have been a bit better without the compromises necessary to bring Snowe and Collins on board, but that’s politics.
Perhaps Sam can tell us which attitude he thinks is working better - Obama’s pragmatism or the Republicans my way or the highway philosophy.
Thanks, Voyager. I would like to take this opportunity to correct an error. Secretary Gates did not turn in his resignation on the day that Obama was nominated, but rather on the day that Obama was sworn in. Both the resignation and Obama’s declining of it were mere formalities that had to take place (or at least, were traditional.)
I couldn’t find an article about heath care. But I trust your synopsis.
I feel bad nitpicking a post I largely agree with but:
To be fair to Bush, I’m not sure the SEC under Clinton, Bush Sr. etc had either the inclination or sufficient remit to do much about any of that either.
Also Iraq, Guantanamo, torture and the effect those have had on America’s image abroad. I happen to believe that Obama is blaming the previous administration for things it genuinely ought to be blamed for, and in the (correct) context of demarcating a break from those policies and practices rather than scapegoating, but it would be incorrect to say that Bush has escaped any criticism from Obama.
Erm. I’m not convinced that Reid and Pelosi have exactly been open and accommodating to items coming down from the White House (except in comparison to the aforementioned Republican leadership, who have been utterly intransigent), especially in things like the stimulus package and the closure of Guantanamo. There’s a reason those two lag far behind Obama in popularity terms - they remain the petty dictators of their respective domains (a characteristic of pretty much every previous holder of those posts of either party, admittedly). Personally I wouldn’t shed a tear to see either go.
So, what are your feelings on Bagram? If Obama want’s America to be the beacon of goodness in the world, why is he pursuing the same policies there as Bush did in Gitmo? (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31046933/)
The talking point from your side about Reagan’s and Bush’s role in blowing up the national debt is to point out that the House is *responsible *for the budget. But then the choice of talking points depends on who’s in power.
It doesn’t work that way in our system. The legislative, executive, and judicial branches are co-equal. There are checks and balances between them, but nothing that can constitute “discipline” in the sense you understand it.
Well - there’s a whole lot of wrong in this little paragraph, unless you confused Bush with Clinton. But let’s look at the North Korean nuclear timeline (from here):
President Reagan:
Mid 1980’s - NK Nuclear Program first detected.
1986 - NK produces plutonium
President G.H.W. Bush
1991 - US begins talks with NK
1992 - NK has sufficient plutonium for 1-2 warheads
President Clinton
1993 - NK announces it will leave non-proliferation agreement.
1994 - US and NK reach Agreed Framework
1994 - NK Freezes nuc production for 8 years.
President G.W. Bush
2002 - Bush labels NK “Axis of Evil”
2003 - NK withdraws for non-proliferation treaty and restarts reactor
2005 - After 6-party talks, NK agrees to abandon nuc program
2006 - NK now has enough plutonium for up to 13 warheads
2006 - NK carries out first nuclear weapons test
So - just to recap - under Clinton’s Agreed Framework - NK freezes nuc activity for 8 years. Under Bush, NK restarts nuc activity, builds and tests a nuclear weapon. How, exactly, would you then support the notion that Bush stopped NKs nuclear activity for several years? In fact, it’s just the opposite. NK had stopped nuc activity - but under Bush, restarted it - built some bombs, and for the first time, set one off.
An editorial piece is hardly a cite. There are lots of opinions about what Obama is doing, and very litle fact — which fact is buried in a paragraph describing as briefly and tersely as possible Obama’s constitutional objections that “Bates’ ruling would for the first time in American history extend habeas corpus rights to non-Americans in a theater of war in a foreign territory. The Bagram site, they contend, is not like Guantanamo because the United States has become de facto ruler of the Cuban base after maintaining control of it since 1903.”
You (and the opinionated hacks in your article) have made a grave logical error: cum hoc, ergo propter hoc. Just because a policy happens to resemble a Bush policy does not mean that Obama has derived the policy using the same reasoning or logic (which presupposes that Bush actually ever used reason or logic). Obama is a good father, just as Bush is a good father. That does not mean that Obama has styled his fathering after Bush’s.
Personally, this just leads me to believe NK can say whatever the hell they want to whoever is the president, and they probably have just been working on their nukes for the past 20 years non-stop.
Personally, I think his three-cent titanium tax goes too far.