Why is that? Why is Obama considered culpable? The facile answer is, I suppose, along the lines of ‘what has he done?’. On the other hand, I’d say, ‘hey, it is getting better, and he didn’t create this mess’.
(I have no partisan platform; I am simply looking to hear both sides of the ‘debate’.)
(And, neither is this an ‘Election’ thread, at least, IMO.)
That the US economy is not better than it is bespeaks of his weak leadership. A strong leader would be able to finesse workable policy through a sometimes reluctant, often obstructionist opposition. A strong leader would have had no problem persuading the same congress to pass appropriate emergency tax measures and job-creating legislation.
Of course, I think the last world leader with anything approaching that sort of persuasive ability was Joe Stalin. Not a nice guy, but he definitely wasn’t too worried about opinion polls.
I think you misunderstand the criticism. He isn’t blamed for causing the crisis. He’s blamed for failing to pull the U.S. out of it. And I’m not well-versed enough in the doublethink and denial required to refute that charge.
Well, no, that I get. I just don’t understand how you can find fault with one fireman when the whole town is up in flames. I mean, really, if anything I’d expect the popular sentiment to be more along the lines of, “Republicans - we won’t make that mistake again!”
It pretty much is. Except it’s more like “Republicans and Obama - we won’t make that mistake again!” A lot of voters wish it were 2016 already, and a lot of them wish they’d voted for Clinton in 2008. Consider also that for Americans this cycle, it’s not R vs. D so much as it is Obama vs. Romney. For some people, all they see is a Republican or a Democrat and it doesn’t matter who is in the suit, but those people don’t decide elections.
Finally, don’t forget that we’re not blaming one fireman. We’re blaming all firemen- Congress has a sub-15% approval rating.
If you do blame policies in place during the Bush administration (or before) for the economic crisis, then it’s silly to arbitrarily assign January 20, 2009 as some magic moment after which everything is “Obama’s fault”. Both the Dems and the Rpubs are guilty of this fallacy. Each economic indicator follows its own path, and it makes sense to measure progress based on the worst point of that indicator (e.g., for unemployment around 10.5%, around the end of 2009, I think it was).
The president is not a dictator. Even without a recalcitrant congress, the entire ship of state only has so much power over the economy (and this is even more true in today’s globalized economy).
If you graph the various economic crises (1929-1938, 1981, 1991-92, 2001-02, 2008-2012), you see that the severity of the crisis is directly correlated with the length of time it takes to emerge from it.
I meant all three points to explain why “blaming Obama for the slow emergence from the economic crisis” is an oversimplification, though not 100% wrong. (I’d put it at 99%. He could have, perhaps, pushed even harder for a bigger infrastructure improvement program within his part of the stimulus packages. But that’s about it.)
Around here people blame Obama for everything because they’re *supposed *to. It’s as simple as that. They don’t understand anything about the economy, nor do they want to or ever intend to. Obama is bad. Really bad. That’s it.
The disapproval is not appropriate, no. That’s not the goal of it.
Levdrakon, if you don’t mind, it might be helpful for the purposes of this thread to tell us where you live. For example, I’m in a mostly-liberal neighborhood (with well-read neighbors) in a university town, but in a state otherwise dominated by the kind of dimwitted people (ok, sorry, uninterested people) you described.
Some people blame Obama because they are partisan Republicans, so no matter what, it’s got to be Obama’s fault, because he’s a Democrat.
Some people don’t know anything about economics, so if times are bad they blame the guy at the top, so no matter what, it’s got to be Obama’s fault, because he’s the president.
The thing about it though, is that the one thing Obama could have done that actually would have helped is something Republicans rabidly oppose: more deficit/stimulus spending.
“The economy” is not a thing. It is a word used to summarize financial decisions made by all three hundred million Americans. The majority of those decisions are made by individuals, not by the federal government. (To be sure, a smaller majority than it used to be.) No politician, not even the President, can force “the economy” to do well when it’s doing badly.
Obama, however, is not well poised to make that argument since he and his allies have made so many claims about the positive effects that his policies will have. The best known example is this report from his council of economic advisers issued just before he took office. They analyzed a stimulus package of $775 billion, and predicted that the unemployment rate would reach a maximum of approximately 7.0% with the stimulus vs. approximately 8.8% without. They acknowledged uncertainty but said that the possible range of jobs created would be 3.3 to 4.1 million. Translated into unemployment numbers, this means of margin of error of about .3%, so the unemployment rate with a stimulus package would have a maximum possible value of 7.3%.
Needless to say, the Democrats passe a stimulus package even larger than the one analyzed in that report, and unemployment rose over 10%. This isn’t the only example of misfiring predictions. The Congressional Budget Office predicted 3.1% GDP growth for 2011 while the real number was 1.6%. Their prediction for 2012 was 2.7%, and the real number will certainly be lower. With such optimistic predictions consistently proving wrong, it’s no hard to understand why some people would think that Obama’s economic policies have disappointed.
ITR champion: That was very informative, thank you!
Notwithstanding “his” poor track record at predicting and minimizing unemployment, I would still have guessed that the average person in the US would forgive him for it. Again, I say that because the economic problems he and his administration are trying to (re)solve are not of “his” making; they were inherited - it can be especially difficult to clean up the mess left by others.
So, at the end of the day, it may all just be ‘political’ - if you support the GOP and/or GWB, you blame Obama for not fixing the problem (“Who cares how it started, as President he needs to fix it”). If you’re a Democrat and/or an Obama fan, you cut him slack (“Unemployment is getting better, it’s just taking more time than we would have thought”). I admit it isn’t a very profound conclusion!
The problem is, a good chunk of Americans are partisan to the point that they are just looking for something to blame the Democrats for (and vice versa). Then you have a bunch of people int he middle who still want someone to “do something to fix the economy” and aren’t necessarily receptive to the idea that it’s all Bush’s fault. Not all of the independents, but many. They don’t want to hear excuses, they want action, even if there isn’t necessarily anything a president can do.
Presidents get blamed for rising gas prices. They get blamed for NK shooting off missiles. There is this certain mindset among many Americans that anything happening anywhere int he world is somehow our problem or something we have to deal with or fix. And if it’s not dealt with or fixed, it’s the president’s fault.
