I guess I don’t see this as lying. He took a political stance that he didn’t agree with privately. Is there any politician who doesn’t do this? Politics is all about compromise.
To me, lying would be saying one thing to get elected with the expectation of doing the opposite once elected.
You don’t get a pass on lying because you did it for political reasons.
Yes, we should not be “shocked” when politicians lie. But let’s not pretend that they aren’t lying.
Of course you do. Not all lies are equivalent, not on this planet, and they’re ubiquitous too. Ones told to advance a good cause are far more acceptable.
The shallow armchair moralizers, who preen about being above it all, claim “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” to be equivalent to “No, honey, that dress doesn’t make your butt look big”, but it ain’t so.
I don’t. He’s always been a follower of the people on the subject, a stance which many of his denouncers also claim is the proper role of an elected public servant anyway. It’s just not a subject he feels strongly about as a principle, but he does want to appear to be on the side of the majority, which he has done.
I also don’t think he’s an outright atheist, he’s just not nearly as religious inside as he professes. But the appearance of piety (preferably Christian, but Jewish is also acceptable) is simply required of an American pol, along with numerous lesser hypocrisies. Saints don’t get elected often, and when they do, they’re ineffective anyway.
Interesting that so many people are in favor of politicians lying outright to the voters when trying to get elected. Though I suspect that for many of these people their views on lying to the voters is highly correlated with their views on the position being lied about.
On another note, Republicans have claimed that one reason they have a hard time making deals with Obama is that they don’t trust him. Any relevance? (No!!! Absolutely not! That’s different …)
If there is any Democratic president the GOP should trust it is Obama, who has proven numerous times that he will bend over whenever they ask him to …perhaps not so much lately, which is a good thing IMO.
In favor? No, I don’t think that’s quite correct. Accepting? Considering the absence of alternatives, yes. If we had a higher quality electorate, more accepting of its responsibility to study the issues objectively and fairly etc., falsehoods wouldn’t be necessary or even beneficial. But that’s not the world we live in, now is it?
Do you think they’re telling the truth about that? :dubious:
I suspect Hillary would have been more leader than follower on this issue, had she won the nomination. Naturally, Obama was better than the Republican alternative. But that doesn’t mean he was the best choice overall.
He’s unquestionably the best POTUS the LGBT community has ever had, but that’s not saying much.
The poster I was responding to claimed it wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t talking about whether it’s a big duck or a little duck, but whether it is a duck:
The thing is, we demand our politician’s personal views on issues in order to ascertain how they will deal with those issues in a professional capacity.
He lied about his personal views, but did not particularly lie about how he would deal with SSM professionally. His administration did NOT pursue legalization, though his defense of DOMA may have been lackluster. He never touted himself as a firebrand for DOMA, or a staunch opponent of SSM, since he supported Civil Unions.
I’d say we got exactly what we could have reasonably expected, given a straight reading of his position.
What, exactly, is the lie? Did he say he would never support SSM? Did he publicly say that he personally was against SSM?
If I was sent to Hell and made a politician I’m sure there would be public policies that I would support (or not support) that might go against my personal opinions.
It does if she would’ve lost to McCain, who presumably wouldn’t have been a leader or a follower on gay rights in general and gay marriage in particular.
No doubt. But 2008 was such a bad year to be a Republican presidential candidate that McCain lost in a landslide to the black Muslim socialist communist America-hating white-hating candidate.* Let’s not forget that Obama was very much the long shot in the Democratic primaries. Clinton would have walked into the White House with much less effort had she been the Dem nominee.
*I am not saying I believe any of these things, natch, just that Obama undoubtedly lost votes to each of these narratives.
You think Obama out-campaigned Clinton before out-campaigning McCain, but that Clinton – who was no match for Obama – would’ve done even better against McCain?
And Clinton’s – a man-hating secret lesbian atheist with car-raaazy long-rejected ideas about health care and a Vince Foster homicide? Or something? It’s been a while.
Who said Clinton was no match for Obama? She actually won more primary votes. That’s beside the point, though. Democrats (at least outside the South and maybe western PA) are generally not going to have a problem voting for a black guy or even a non-Christian. That’s not necessarily true of the electorate in general.
I think you’re overthinking this, anyway. The more electable candidate often wins the primary - see Mitt Romney - but not always.
And sure, you can throw out similar epithets at Hillary. But none of them caught on or became mainstream news the way stuff people said about Obama did. Hillary had no Reverend Wright and certainly no birth certificate “scandal”.
The latter. He said that, even though he (according to Axelrod) actually wasn’t personally opposed, because it was thought to be politically dangerous to admit the truth. He invoked his Christian faith as, at least part of, the reason he personally opposed SSM. In 2008:
He said “for me” 3 times, so I think we can be sure he meant “personally”.
Was any President elected that didn’t lie to get there?
(Maybe Washington, since I seem to recall that he was reticent to accept the position.)
Washington’s reticence may have been an act, too.
I don’t think less of Obama for this, but it reinforces my contempt for idiot Americans who believe or act as if they believe the gay-marriage issue is contentious in the first place.
And, as per that cite, he won more delegates.
Can’t you just as easily impute sexism to non-Democrats as you do racism and so on?
Well, coming back around to what I’d said, Obama did land a pretty solid hit on her in the debates by noting that her proposed health-insurance plan was a horrible idea because it’d force the poor to buy insurance.
Mistake