He will not learn. He imagines he can find some mythical middle ground with the Republicans. He caves on every tough issue before the fight begins.
He is still a far better president than John McCain would have been. I can’t imagine voting for any conceivable Republican presidential candidate in 2012. But I will not be surprised if he loses in 2012 because he will have lost the support of all the progressives.
Perhaps… But I still wonder about a few things: what proportion of the voting public are “true” and passionate progressives. How much of the voting public will remember any of this in two years, good economy or bad. How much said voting public actually KNOWS about the President’s “capitulations” and to what extent they care (completely separate from whether they SHOULD). How much they agree with the specifics of the anger here (e.g. tax cuts for the rich = automatically bad, we need to spend more to save the economy, etc.).
I mean, it’s easy to think of oneself as well-informed and politically savvy, and to think that everyone else, or even a vast majority, are too. Time and time again I have to wonder how much that’s true.
ETA: Granted, this only addresses the last sentence of the OP. But still, a lot of it is predicated on certain points of agreement and knowledge that I’m not sure is widespread. I wonder this every time I read Daily Kos. Yes, there’s a lot of anger, but even there, a lot of the level and type of anger displayed is… controversial amongst its writers and commenters, to say the least. I mean, there is a lot of “shouting,” as it were, but if the Tea Party’s taught us anything, it’s to be skeptical of loud shouters, and how much they reflect on the public at large.
Bottom line: whether Obama is a “terrible” President depends on a lot of factors, and it may be that a “majority rules” on this aspect of Presidential effectiveness/popularity. I don’t know. It’s a bit complex, in my mind.
For a while I’ve been thinking of Obama as a tragic figure, somewhat like Carter.
Carter wanted to make the USA more energy-efficient and energy-independent (the “sweater speech”, the symbolic solar panels on the roof of the White House) but he got sideswiped by the rise of the Reagan supporters and their superior emotional campaigning. “We’re going to have to cut back together. Here, take this sweater.” couldn’t hold a candle emotionally to “It’s morning in America!”.
And then Reagan lucked out with the North Sea oil fields and the Alaska Pipeline coming online, providing enough energy to fuel the Techno Boom of the end of the 20th century and kicking worries about energy scarcity down the road a generation to… now.
That whole Iranian hostage thing didn’t help Carter either. I’d love to see the inside Straight Dope on that–I always thought it was suspicious that the Ayatollahs released the last hostages the day Reagan took power.
On the other hand, I don’t think Carter swept into power with as much hype as Obama did. Those kinds of expectations are really hard to live up really hard to live up to even if you do everything right. I’m not sure Obama is as specifically greenish as Carter was, but similarly to Carter, I do think he’s trying to politick using reasoned policy arguments–and still getting run over by emotional demagoguery. Once you get a reputation as being weak, it’s very hard to overcome, even if you aren;t actually weak.
He had the rare opportunity to unite the country and lift us up from the depths of a recession… and instead focused all of his energies on health care reform, a noble cause, but not when so many people are out of work. I think he’s out of touch with reality, or at least what people want him to focus on.
He’s getting us out of Iraq, but both of my son-in-laws will be heading that way soon… but not as combat troops. Sure.
He’s a smart, capable and savvy guy, so I primarily blame his handlers, which he is slowly getting rid of.
Terrible president? The jury is still out… but after the past election he has a long way to go in my book.
He’s still had less than two years. It’s a job with a pretty steep learning curve, and he’s actually accomplished quite a bit considering what he inherited, and the unprecdented, saturation, media attack campaign he has to contend with.
I never thought he was going to be a lefty, but that was because I paid attention to what he said during the campaign. I still think he’ll be reelected, and that by the time it’s over, he will have become a pretty solid President.
Having said that, it does drive me nuts that he never fires back at the Republicans and continually reaches out to them under the continued delusion that they actually give a fuck about the country. The Republicans have no better nature. They are driven by an uncomprehending, gibbering mob, and he needs to stop trying to relate to them as human beings. It’s like when people try to talk to zombies in zombie movies. They’re aren’t listening. There’s nobody in there. They’re going to eat your face. Use your shotgun already.
This is something else I’d been thinking of, brought up previously in the thread. It seemed to me that a lot of folks (perhaps especially many of the Kossacks I mentioned earlier) seemed to have expectations or assumptions of Obama not borne out by anything he ever actually said, did, or wrote. Is this impression accurate? If so, how’d it happen?
Damned if I know. Projection I guess. I thought he made it pretty obvious he was going to be moderate at best.
Hell, even his health care bill was recycled from Bob Dole. That’s how far right the government has regressed. What used to be a conservative Republican policy is now “Socialist.”
Liberals like me have nowhere else to go. We insist on voting, will fight against electing a Republican and by default will vote for Obama.
He insists on starting in the middle and negotiating what is left to the right. He is unfailingly polite when I’d like him to smack the fools around a bit. His achievements are the sort of things that Republicans from my youth would have been happy about passing.
He has no liberal ambitions.
I don’t think that the 2010 elections were all that remarkable except for the left staying away from the polls. But in my state, California, the Republicans met with disaster. They lost on every issue that mattered to them and in every close race except on The Reefer, which I don’t care about.
The Republicans lost badly in California and it looks like they may do worse next election. There will be no Meg Whitman in 2014 to try to outspend Jerry Brown 5 to one when he is an incumbent. He has a better chance of being recalled then beaten if he chooses to run in 2014.
Search on the words “October Surprise”. True? shrug Reagan won, and in no small part on his pledge to get the hostages released.
Stranger
Agree completely. Unfotunately, he has no experience in managing people, and it shows. His cabinet choices have been very bad (Geithner, Holder,Napolitano, etc.), and he seems unable to learn from his experiences.
The big issue now is that he has lost the conservative Democrats-and he will have great difficulty in the House.
We are also coming to a head with Europe and Japan-the Wiki leaks are a symptom of the mistrust between the heads of state (for which Obama is squarely to blame).
The latest attempt to stimulate the economy (Bernanke) will fail, and the USA will see a collapse of the dollar.
He is following the Jimmy Carter script to a T.
The Ayatollahs hated Carter for giving the Shah asylum and knew that Carter in the long run would more quickly undermine their plans for a nasty autocracy. Frankly, Reagan is a better devil for the Ayatollahs than Carter as long as they didn’t give him cause to invade. By releasing the hostages, Reagan has no cause and looks amazing. Reagan and Khomeini hit it off, both have their foreign devils to whip hysteria up over.
Did the Reagan campaign have an explicit deal? Probably, but it will never be proven to the satisfaction of any of the hard right supporters (hard right being Reagan and Khomeini). There is better evidence that the Nixon campaign got the North Vietnamese to fake the peace talks with LJB’s administration.
Do I personally believe that Reagan’s team (or Nixon’s) would do this sort of thing? Absolutely. It worked in 68 and it was the same people doing it in 80. Did the people like Cheney do this sort of thing? It is certainly in character for them. They make money off of war and power, and they enjoy lying and ratfucking and have a long history of it.
Did Reagan personally have anything to do with it? I doubt it. He was a delegater and didn’t take interest in the details. His campaign goons would have done it.
If the economy collapses it is because of reduced super high deficits and regulatory collapse, both policies of the Republicans for the past 30 years. I realize the Republicans believe that it is right and proper to lie about their own mistakes and try to place the blame on their opponents for their own mistakes. It would be good for the country, however, for patriotic Republicans to examine their own history of failure with an honest light and consider that their policies are on balance, not conservative, but radical and destabilizing and consider voting for the moderates. The ones that occupy the White House now. I don’t particularly care for the Obama team’s politics, but I do realize that they are the best we will get.
So far, he’s been disappointing. We are still way better off than with President McCain and the Tina Fey impersonator.
As far as legislation, I don’t think there’s been a President since I’ve been alive that has had as successful a first two years. The comparisons to Carter are kinda bizarre, Carter alienated Congress early on and never got any major legislation through.
Some people seem disappointed that Obama didn’t try and recreate Britain’s NHS here in the States, but that seems pretty silly. A universal single payer system was never going to happen even if Obama had ended up combining the best qualities of FDR, LBJ and Jesus, and Obama certainly never ran on making it happen, so the fact that it didn’t materialize out of nowhere isn’t particularly surprising.
But I agree that after the Financial Reform package passed, and it became obvious that the GOP wasn’t going to let any other legislation through the Senate, the Administration has been annoyingly slow to adapt a new strategy to deal with obstructionism and ceeded way too much momenta to the GOP. Hopefully by the time the new Congress is seated Obama and the other Dems will have actually bothered to hash out a plan.
The only two obviously true items from an otherwise horse-kicked-in-the-head-as-a-child stupid-level post. The second bit being obviously true solely due to Obama’s seeming inability to recognize that “Republican” and “compromise” are mutually exclusive.
I’m mildly surprised you didn’t mention “socialist”, “Kenyan”, “Rev. Wright”, or “muslim” in there…
He didn’t need to–we’ve read his stuff before.
Another Democrat here who is more liberal than Obama’s policies have been–but not surprised. There’s no way in hell that I’d vote for a Republican in response. And I’d hardly flush my vote down a Green toilet.
+1 (and I wouldn’t change a word)
PS- Why couldn’t we have had 8 years with one of the millions of Smart Texans as president instead of a bottom 1 percenter like Bush???
Two Congressional investigations, plus more by the MSM, found that the idea of an October Surprise was unfounded bullshit. Cite.
Which is another reason why we should never have elected someone with so little experience doing much of anything. No executive experience, no management experience, no military experience, no business experience, less than two years Senate experience - if he finishes his first term, it will be the longest he has ever held a full-time job in his life.
There has been no such thing, obviously.
I think you have hit on Obama’s problem - there is a core of the Left who will vote for him no matter what, and (obviously) a core on the Right who never will. He therefore has to appeal to the moderates. There is where he has failed - his health care bill was the mishmash of someone who does not know how to get legislation passed. If BHO were LBJ, it would have been possible to get even single-payer thru and all the lefties would be falling at his feet and worshipping. But instead we got a half-term Senator with no major legislation to his credit, on whom we can project our fantasies. Unfortunately, fantasy only lasts so long.
Regards,
Shodan
D the C:
An apt analogy which will be going through my mind all day.
Intolt
Eight seconds of looking at Obama’s entry on wikipedia shows this isn’t anywhere close to true.