A lot of people thought he was a change. He was not. He was a quite typical politician, or “off the shelf Chicago politician” as Bill Clinton put it.
The exact same things all politicians do: hype the supposed benefits of your favored legislation while saying the negatives that critics point out are dirty lies. Not directly answer questions from the media, but instead spin and dodge like crazy. Refuse to take responsibility for failures in your own administration. Waging wars in several countries and acting as if you’re not waging war(most of his supporters don’t even seem to know we’re at war. That’s some good messaging, actually). But yeah, that kind of thing from a guy who promised to be different will tend to increase cynicism.
But maybe my arguments don’t convince you. Perhaps this will: confidence in our institutions is at a Watergate-level low. The Presidency in particular, which I’d HOPE you’d acknowledge is primarily Obama’s responsibility, him being President and all, has barely improved on the late Bush era lows.
Only 33% of Americans have a great deal or a lot of confidence in the Presidency.
Now perhaps you have different theories about how the President has failed America, but there’s just no way you can look at those numbers and not conclude that he has failed. At least as a change agent. Maybe history will judge his Presidency kindly, but the central appeal of his candidacy was a fraud. He used his “newness” as a cudgel to defeat first Hillary Clinton and in the end didn’t govern any differently than she would have.
Like the old joke about just needing to be faster that the other guy to escape the bear, your “theory”, that is the joke, can not escape the fact that the republican congress has even more abysmal numbers.
And that the current leaders of Congress have failed America, are frauds, that they used their “newness” as a cudgel to try to defeat Obama and in the end did govern even worse than previous congresses would have.
And show how the movie Ideocracy is for real for Republican congress critters.
The “bear” Obama needs to outrun in this case is past Presidents, not Congress. Congress is responsible for Congress’ low ratings. The President is responsible for his.
The fact is, nothing has changed between Bush and Obama other than some fairly predictable policy changes that would have occurred with any Democrat in office. Sorry, but very few people voted for Obama and thought to themselves, “Whew! Thank God we’re finally going to have a typical Democratic politician in the White House. This is what I’ve waited for for eight years!”
He was supposed to be different. He wasn’t. End of story.
The bear is the voters, and also historians that are still aware of the change that has been observed after the ruinous Bush the lesser administration.
I already posted evidence of how wrong you are. Your platitudes are becoming even more distrusted if you do not acknowledge it.
Too bad you are not teaching history, I had.
Again, your own words and argument does betray the Republicans that control congress that got much much worse numbers than the president. Unless you take it back, but I’m happy that you are doubling down on the now clear reason why the Republicans do deserve to be changed over.
Speaking as an outsider, as a non American I cannot agree with your premise.
To me there has been a massive difference in America since Obama became President.
Now that may or may not be in policy making process - however in terms of policy making, building bridges, showing a willingness to co-operate and make things better rather than wage war I find huge.
And it seems to be in line with the general principles he campaigned on. His presidency has struck me as thoughtful and reasoned, knowledgeable and helpful in ways that Bush was not.
And when I look at the way that Obama talks and expresses himself - he is a huge change. Who could forget Bush’s “axis of evil” or the “with us or against us” or even the show boaty landing on the carrier and “mission accomplished”. To say that Obama has not presented a totally different Presidency to this is counter factual.
There may still be things happening (Guantanamo for one) that are not quite what many would like - but in general terms, Obama was and is a change, it is not “politics as usual”.
But how is that different from what Clinton would have done? And let’s not forget that Obama is waging war in more places, and with fewer allies. He’s just not using ground troops, which so far has simply meant failed states instead of occupations. That may be good for the United States, but i don’t see what virtue a foreigner would find in it.
Basically, Obama is liked better by Westerners. There isn’t any real policy meat or accomplishments behind it though. I mean, you guys gave him a peace prize almost immediately, so it’s kinda hard to take the perspective of fellow Westerners seriously. Obama isn’t bombing your countries. That does not mean that the war went away. Europe is just as subject to attack as it was in the Bush years. Obama has done zilch to make you, or us, safer. He’s just reduced the cost of our fighting the war. But it’s still being fought, and the war hasn’t forgotten about us even if many Westerns have decided to forget about it.
I don’t see how you can blame Obama. A presidential campaign has no responsibility for its words and actions, it’s unavoidable based on the conditions set by his predecessor. It can only be Bush’s fault.
I’ll give him that, but that’s not the change in approach that bengangmo was citing. His one act that made us safer was a violent one, and he actually did something that was a bit out of line in terms of international law as well. In that case he was MORE hawkish and unilateral than Bush, not less.
Looked at the link. Sentence the first is truth: institutions overall are at low levels of confidence. Sentence the second is untrue. No, not the Presidency in particular.
Overall Presidency is above most institutions including the Supreme Court and waaay above Congress.
In terms of trend lines for the Presidency - confidence “great deal/quite a lot” modestly lower than the mostly 40s it’s averaged overall - currently 33. Roughly 70 to 75% of its historic average. Had gotten as low as 25 for Bush.
In comparison the other major government institutions?
Congress has dropped from a never trusted much average of the 20s down to 8%. Yeah about 35% of its already dismal historic baseline.
The Supreme Court’s drop is a bit more than the Presidency drop, not as bad as Congress’s - from near 50 to 32, roughly 60 to 65% of its historic baseline.
There are apparently relatively few institutions that the public trusts right now. The military, the police, and the criminal justice system have apparently held up … but then again the last recorded was June 2015 and one suspects that recent events have lowered the police and justice systems numbers some. Organized religion about the same percent drop as the Presidency. What with the molestation scandals surprising not worse. Banks … well, say no more. So on.
But no. It is an untrue statement to claim that there has been a drop in confidence in the Presidency in particular. Confidence in that institution has in fact held up moderately well.
Absolutely. A successful Bush Presidency where people were happy with the status quote would have led to President Jeb.
If people really like Obama’s Presidency and don’t just have some fondness for the idea of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton should coast to the Presidency by at least as big a victory margin as he won in 2012.
Only compared to the nadir of the Bush years. And Obama got a ton of benefit of the doubt when he started. Confidence in the Presidency didn’t drop because of Republicans. that’s as dumb as blaming Obama for violence at Trump rallies. Confidence in the Presidency went down from three seperate times the President, the “Buck stops here” guy, saying, “I read about my administration’s failures in the newspaper, just like you did.” statements which earned him righteous derision from the media, some of whom called him a “bystander to his own Presidency”.
Looks that we are headed that way. Unless you want to claim that the same pollsters that told us about the advantage Trump was going to get in the Republican Primaries are wrong when reporting that Hillary was usually ahead by 5 points, Obama won in 2012 by 3.6 %. She is now ahead by 6 or 10 in the aggregates we usually look at.
You won’t find a single major media figure that doesn’t hold the President responsible for his administration’s failures. That’s strictly a message board phenomenon. “How could he know? He didn’t write the code!” “How could he know? It happened in a Cincinnati office!” “How could he know? It was just bad VA officials!”
In two of those three cases he was warned beforehand by Republican Congressmen that bad stuff was happening. He ignored them. And now we know that VA officials took longer than they should have to bring problems to Congress’ attention because as they put it, “We don’t talk to Republicans.” Except they went to Democrats, Tammy Duckworth being one of them, and nothing came of it. And going up the chain of command wasn’t getting them anywhere either. Obama don’t do management, that’s for people below him.
You know normally it’s easier to talk about politics with liberals because they tend to care about things like facts, and science, and logic. But they have one huge blindspot: the image they have of their allies in the political class MUST match the image of themselves that they advertise. So Obama is a strong leader who brought about change, and Hillary Clinton is honest. Any facts to the contrary are either brand new to the reader, or Republican lies.
It’s no secret to two thirds of the country or the mainstream media why people are cynical and angry. It only confuses people who frequent liberal-dominated discussion boards.
I don’t follow the logic. If you liked X, then you should love Y, because Y is similar in some ways to X?
Have you considered the possibility that the blind spot might be on your side?
I think Obama’s presidency on the whole has been very good, despite GOP obstructionism, and I don’t base that assessment on a feeling. The economy and jobs figures have recovered very well compared to the rest of the developed world, millions more have health insurance, then you have all the smaller stuff like increased investment in renewables (without being too anti-fracking), OBL, ending cuban embargo etc etc.
At this point I should restrain myself.